Our View: Decisions, not policies, are needed

People on public boards and commissions are supposed to make decisions.

That’s why the rules and laws governing those boards are often brief and open-ended. The members of the board are supposed to listen to the facts and make informed choices, rather than rely exclusively on pre-written guidelines that cannot possibly anticipate every single issue the board or commission might encounter.

We raise this point because of what transpired last week at a meeting of the state Transportation Commission, a body of nine members appointed by the governor. The commissioners are up in arms about all the requests they’re getting these days from people who want to name state highways. The requests are flooding in to name roads in honor of war heroes, fallen police officers, great achievers from history, etc.

Board members don’t feel they have enough guidance about how to consider such requests. Apparently, the only existing guidance in rule or law says that highway-naming requests must be for someone of “historic significance.” Commission members want a new, more explicit policy, and maybe even a higher fee.

The aim of the proposed new policy and higher fee is apparently to reduce the number of highway-naming requests. Mitchell’s own John Kranz, a member of the commission, was quoted as saying last week that “We need to squash this down.”

We’d like to make a couple of suggestions.

First, although a fee increase may be in order to cover state government’s costs, we hope the commission doesn’t discourage highway-naming requests with a raft of new regulations. Government officials always lament the public’s lack of participation. Sometimes, when the public participates and the government officials have to deal with it, the government officials get perturbed. The Transportation Commission’s response to the highwaynaming issue is a classic example.

We see the bevy of highway-naming requests as a sign of a healthy, active, participatory body of citizens at work. And we see absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Second, the commissioners certainly don’t need a stack of new regulations to assist with the consideration of highwaynaming requests. All they really need is what their existing policy already gives them: discretion.

If commissioners don’t like a particular naming request, they should simply vote “no” and reject it. That’s why the commission exists: to consider the various sides of an issue and make a decision, even if that means disappointing some people on the other side of the table.

Nobody is forcing the commissioners to approve every request that comes down the pike. Their plea for a bunch of new regulations to help them do their job strikes us as a cop-out — a way of avoiding situations in which they might have to say “no” and hurt somebody’s feelings.

Saying “no” — or “yes,” if a highwaynaming request is worthy of approval — is exactly what the commissioners are supposed to do. It’s called decision-making, and it’s why the governor appointed them to the commission.

Tags: our view, opinion