by Craig Ruff
March 16, 2009

In Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy described South Carolinian Tom Wingo’s first impression of Manhattan from an airplane: “It was too much of too much.”

Talk about too much of too much. How about the more than 3,000 units of government and 22,000 elected officials in Michigan?

My late mentor Jim Brickley decried the bed sheet ballot. He saw it bewildering to voters. After election, the sheer number of elected officials closeted accountability and produced inefficiency in delivering public services. Jim noted that we elect only four people to run the federal government: the president/vice president, two U.S. senators, and one congressman. Michiganians had to elect 44 people to govern the state.

Wisdom like that is why mentors just keep on living, giving, and guiding.

Early this term, I tried to make sense of state and local governance to aspiring students in my grad class at U of M. For the first time, I added up the number of folks necessary to run state and local governments in Michigan. As Governor Granholm might say, it “blew me away.”

Please give me a bit of wiggle room for error, but here is my guess as to the number of elected state and local officials in Michigan:

• State government (44 electees). Includes the governor/lieutenant governor; secretary of state; attorney general; a state senator; a state representative; eight members each of the state board of education and governing boards of Wayne State, Michigan State, and the University of Michigan; and seven Supreme Court justices.
• Cities (2,500). For each of our 274 cities, assume a combination of nine mayors, city councilpersons, and clerks.
• Villages (2,600). For each of our 259 villages, assume a combination of 10 presidents, councilpersons, clerks, and treasurers.
• Townships (11,200). For each of our 1,242 townships, assume a combination of nine supervisors, clerks, treasurers, trustees, and park commissioners.
• Counties (1,500). For each of the 83 counties, assume a combination of 18 executives, clerks, registrars of deeds, sheriffs, prosecutors, treasurers, drain commissioners, and county commissioners.
• K–12 Schools (3,800). For each of 540 K–12 school districts, assume seven board members each.
• Judges (800). Includes district/recorders court, circuit, and court of appeals judges and seven state Supreme Court justices.

The above does not include those elected to community college boards, intermediate school districts/regional educational service agencies, and intergovernmental authorities. Nor does the list of ballot offices include the political parties’ delegates elected in 5,300 precincts. They govern political parties and tax voters’ indulgence, but have no authority over public policy.

We do have more doctors than elected officials (roughly 30,000 compared to 22,000). Also more lawyers (32,000). For every dentist, however, we have more than three elected officials. There are about seven gas stations for every elected office in Michigan.

Don’t tell me where you think I’m going. I cast no aspersions on elected officials. Surely a handful are numbskulls, truants, thieves, and ne’er-do-wells. But nearly 100 percent are honest and decent folks who donate their time to our governance and, in return, get midnight calls from nut cases with petty bitches.

Where I’m heading is this. De Gaulle pondered how you can govern a nation with 246 varieties of cheese. How do you govern a state of 10 million people with 22,000+ elected offices?

These 22,000+ people did not beg residents to create their jobs. Nor did they draw boundaries or constitutionally or legislatively carve out their policy making provinces. For reasons foreign to me, they gather petitions for or request nomination to get on a ballot, put their families under a public microscope, scrape for some cash to electioneer, bone up on issues, pound the pavement, and endure debates and public forums. The worst is yet to come. When asked the first thing he’d do if elected New York City mayor, William F. Buckley replied: “Demand a recount.”

I do not debate the virtues (with exceptions) of those seeking or holding public office. Like Jim Brickley, I question why it takes so many to oversee the public’s wellbeing.

Manhattan overwhelms Tom Wingo, just as a horrific upbringing scarred him and his suicidal sister living in NYC. Conroy writes of their parents: “They were remarkable in so many ways that the gifts they bestowed almost equaled the havoc they so thoughtlessly wreaked.”

The gifts of Thomas Jefferson and his laying out of the Northwest Territory’s grid of local governments, many state constitutional delegates over time, and all of our state legislators and governors created the good, bad, and ugly in Michigan governance. For all the good that they have sought, there has been an equal measure of havoc to the public good, accountability, and efficiency.

It’s clear to me of elected officialdom in Michigan: it’s too much of too much.

Craig Ruff is, among many things, a senior policy fellow and former president of Lansing-based Public Sector Consultants.