Observations and analysis of a Lawrence County Commission meeting

¶ … Meeting Attended meeting of the Lawrence County Commission was attended on March 26, 2002 at 5:00 P.M. At the Lawrence County Court House.

Structure of the Government Body

Lawrence County, Tennessee has 18 county commissioners. One commissioner is elected per district to serve a two-year term. Each commissioner is then assigned to a different subcommittee, where each subcommittee covers an area such as budget, school, highway and property taxes.

Each of the subcommittees meet several times a week to discuss their particular area.

All the commissioners then meet once a month where the ideas of each subcommittee are combined for discussion.

Each of the commissioners are paid $200 dollars a month for their role.

Opinion on the Meeting

The setup of the commission appeared to be well-organized. Having separate subcommittees focus on individual areas meant each issue could be dealt with thoroughly. It also meant efficient use of the commissioners' time since at the monthly meeting, the commissioners would only need to hear summaries and calls for changes instead of discussing every issue at great length.

The meeting also appeared well organized at the beginning, with the chairman calling the meeting open and leading the group through the roll and the invocation. This beginning made me think it would be a well-organized and controlled meeting with the chairman able to control and lead the group.

After the resolutions were tabled there was much less organization and control. When the resolution to move the election was made there was much argument. This argument was not in an organized way and was not very well controlled by the chairman. This suggested to me that the meetings ran fine as long as there was no discussion required, but broke down when a questionable issue was raised. I saw this as a sign of a major problem and thought that the commission should have been better able to deal with this issue. In my opinion, it is easy for a commission to deal with issues that everyone agrees on.

The commission also actually resolved only a few issues, putting the remainder off until a later date. I thought this was another sign of a breakdown. The setup of the subcommittees is a good timesaving device, so there is concern that the committee still did not have time to deal with all the issues at the meeting. It suggested to me that the subcommittees were operating efficiently, but the combined committee was not.

The commissioners were also very different and this caused some problems with the committee. Most of the committee members were not acting very professionally and there differences caused some communication problems. These differences may also have been added to by the fact that each committee member was focused on different issues because of the subcommittee they were part of.