Hello everyone, thanks for watching Peak Time. I'm Jack Peak, your host. Do you know
what your county government does for you? Do you even know that we have a county government?
Barnstable County has been around since 1685, but it had no legislative authority until
just recently in the late 1980s. It's interesting to note that Massachusetts eliminated 8 out
of 14 county governments in the 1990s, but we still have Barnstable County government here
in the Cape. Depending on who you talk to, it is one vital to Cape Cod, two, it's a total waste
of money, or it's useful, but it could be more efficient. Most people really don't have any
idea what the county does for us. Recently it's been in the news and editorials. There have been
proposals to change the composition of representatives and the number of commissioners
and ideas for cutting the budget. Our program today will examine the county government and what it
does for Cape Cod and what it does not do and how it syncs with local and state government and where
it gets its money. Coming up, the Peak Time Primer on county government with a special guest,
executive director of the county, Jack Unitz. He'll tell you in us what it's all about.
All right, today we'd like to welcome Jack Unitz, CEO of the Barnstable County government. Is that
your title, CEO? I'm the county administrator. I actually work for a three-person elected board
called the county commissioners. Okay, Jack is also an author of the book called The Urban Mayor,
which is just in a nutshell about what? It's a mix between an account of my 10 years as mayor of
the city of Brockton and some best practice suggestions for governing for future political
leaders. Okay, so with that kind of, you were a mayor? Yes, I was the mayor at Brockton.
What kind of experience the county government must be in? Good hands here. I think county
government has a lot of potential. It's not the mechanisms to people. As I mentioned in the
intro, the average person on the Cape really doesn't have a clue as to what the county
government is. Some people do, but if they do, it's like, yeah, you know, there's a county
government. I'm not really sure what it does. So what's the mission? Well, you know, years ago,
Massachusetts was comprised of counties and they were effective counties, much the same way as the
South still is today in the Midwest. County governments ran the jails. They ran public
safety. They built the roads, dug the reservoirs. And then over time, Massachusetts geopolitical
rule took over. Counties were phased out a little bit, except here on Cape Cod. And the reason
it didn't get phased out in Cape Cod was around 1980, a huge building boom ensued down here. And at
the same time, the problems that the military base out at Otis became obvious to the world. So you
had pressing environmental concerns, a sole-source aquifer that starts up in the Northern
Moraine and runs all the way down here, and unimpeded growth happening all over the Cape with
little towns that really didn't have the personnel or the structure to stop this development. And
it was coming, really, it was a perfect storm. So the people of Cape Cod coalesced, filed a
homeroom petition, and created their own county government. And it's a unique charter. It's
unique to Cape Cod. It's not anywhere else. So it was created just in the 1980s. I was interested in
my research. I found that Massachusetts has had counties since the 1600s, and Baltimore County
is the oldest. But they just eliminated the county government in like six, eight out of the 14.
They did. They did about 1999. They began eliminating county governments. They started by
eliminating Suffolk, Middlesex, Essex, Hampshire, and Berkshire counties. Anyway, we have Bynesville
County. So the mission is... The mission, really, if I could say it in one sentence, the mission is
to make sure that the quality of life of residents of Cape Cod is protected and preserved. And that's
what starts with our water, clean water. That's the main priority. That's the main priority. But we
do so much more than that in terms of servicing the towns we represent. We really haven't done a
good job of messaging, and that's why people don't know that. That's why I'm happy to be out here,
because messaging is an important part of our mission. There's been a lot in the paper in the
last... Well, I'm relatively new to the Cape. So ever since I've gotten up here in the last few
years, there's controversial stuff in the paper about the county government, the budget, what it
does. Sometimes towns seem to have some conflict with it. The representation. You're the director
of the county government, and you answer to the three commissioners. So the board of commissioners,
or whatever you... Yeah, the board of commissioners, and they were elected at large across the county.
They cannot be two commissioners from the same town. So you have three at large commissioners in
every town, and that's the executive branch of our government. The legislative branch of the
government is the 15 representatives elected in each town in the biennial election by the
voters, and they're called the assembly of delegates. So you've got the commission and the
executive branch, assembly of delegates, which is the legislative branch. And from what I...
That's one of the controversies, I guess. There are various proposals to change the
representation or the number of delegates and the number of commissioners from what I've seen.
Actually, in the original charter, the elected members of the county government are supposed
to convene periodically to review the charter and make recommendations for the charter's change.
Historically, they've done ordinance changes, but they've never... Well, not recently anyway,
have they met to actually propose a unified charter change. There's been charter changes
that have been voted in the assembly and not by the commissioners and so on and so forth.
And a charter change can be a number of things. It can be just the rewriting of the language,
a clarification of how we budget and who's responsible ultimately for approving that
budget, or it can be a wholesale charter change and how people are elected to represent.
Yeah, in my research, I see it in the paper too, the representation is 15 delegates,
one from each town, but their vote as a percentage... Based on population.
I guess adds up to 100%, but it's based on population. I'm from Churro. We get like a
less than 1% vote. There's not much clout there. And then Barnstable gets over 20%.
I can say about Churro, you may have a small vote, but you have a large voice.
Large voice.
Deborah McCutcheon...
I was hoping you weren't going to say big mouth.
No, no, no. Deborah McCutcheon is a well-thought, well-read person who represents the town of
Churro, and the county at large. And she's inquisitive, she's certainly gallant, and
does a heck of a job of making a small vote, a big voice for the younger people.
That's good to hear, especially since... Yeah, one of our future programs, I think I want
to get a couple of the delegates on and end, or maybe one or two of the commissioners on
and look at the political side of it. I think our goal today is to explain what it's all
about, what the county government does. Several proposals will change, but let me ask this
question, kind of a reverse question. A lot of people think, why don't we need a county
government for it? It's no big deal. We can't see evidence that they're doing anything.
If you're careful when you read, you can see the evidence. But if county government on
the Cape cease to exist tomorrow, what wouldn't it miss? What would we lose out at?
Well, I'll tell you, there's quite a bit. First and foremost, the centralization of
the water and wastewater management programs would be in jeopardy, which means there would
be a huge expense put on the towns to hire their own experts on everything from innovative
septic treatments, programs that we're doing out at the base, to shellfish management.
The solid waste management program is supervised by the county. We test every landfill. We
monitor every landfill across the Cape. In addition to that, just a few things we do.
For instance, the SHINE program that we run out of a human services division, assist 7,000
Medicare patients across the Cape on the vagaries of the Medicare law.
Well, I'm giving you a population of the Cape. That's a big percentage of senior citizens
out there. There would be no entity to do that if we
did not exist. We do 2,000 restaurant inspections every summer on the donut as part of the taxes
that the town sent to us. So restaurant inspection, health inspection,
so the county does that as opposed to the town.
We do that to supplement the towns. We don't have police powers. So the towns will call
us in and ask us for support during the summer months because they don't want to hire health
inspectors 12 months a year and not be able to use them.
So we come in and supplement that. We test 1,000 beaches and ponds and streams on a regular
basis down here. We do the soil analysis across the Cape. We have our own lab. We provide
internet services to a number of towns out here.
Provide internet through email. The email and voice comes across through the county
to a number of towns out here and we do some of your 911 services.
To the town facilities, you mean?
To the town facilities, right?
Not to the public.
No, not to the public. No. For the municipal.
The way my cable built just went up if you could provide us with any facilities.
We're trying to get competitive on that, too, and I'll talk about that later. But we also
do things like procurements. If each town was to go out and procure its own highway
work and salt purchases, which we take over next year, the fertilizers that the towns
use for their golf courses, etc., the chemicals they use in their water, all these things
we purchase globally. So the cost per unit goes way down.
A bit better purchasing power than, I mean, Truro, we've got a couple of thousand people
in Truro. It's a pretty small town.
So the scale is shared across the county when we take the lead and do that. I know the WB
Mason contract, for instance, is about a 60% price reduction when we bid it. So that's
huge savings to the school departments across the Cape.
So there's just a lot we'd miss. There's a lot you would miss if county government
was to shut down tomorrow. Budget. There's been some issues about the
budget running with about a $28 million budget, approximately.
Yeah, $28.5, yeah. I think Truro, I'm from Truro because I know
the figures there a little more. It's interesting because the figure I got, they give, they
taxed over $85,000 that goes to the county, but then $91,000 plus that goes to the Cape
Pat Commission. Those are one and the same.
The Commission is the department of the county, but they were created later than the county
and they were created to be the regulatory authority on development and growth in the
county. So they really are in a unique position where they don't answer to me necessarily.
Don, I was going to ask that. It's a department. You have 15 departments?
We have five departments. Five departments.
If I include the Commission, it would be six, but again, they have an incredibly able director,
Paul D'Wickey, who's been in the role for a while.
And Paul runs the Cape Cod Commission. And as I said, they supervise developments. They're
the regulatory authority. They oversee the 208 program, which is the wastewater monitoring
program.
The Cape Cod Commission really is almost like a separate. It's a department of the county
government, but it really operates independently, would you say?
Yep.
Because the taxes go separately from the government.
Right, that's correct. And that's segregated on purpose.
Some of the, well, segregated on purpose.
They wanted to be sure that the commission was not part of the electoral process, that
the commission remained independent for obvious reasons.
How do you get people on the commission? Are the commissioners there?
The commissioners do hire the director. The director hires the staff through, and we of
course are the fiscal agents.
Some of the issues with the budget, a lot of debt, if you want to understand.
Actually that's not the case. It might look like that, but the debt is no different than
any of the debt in any of the towns. It's mostly pension and op-ed.
Pension and obligation?
Yes.
Okay.
And the only debt we really have is internal debt. And it's paper debt. What we did over
the years, a very, very imprudent accounting, is we went out, we authorized capital projects
through a bond, but we never borrowed. We ended up spending it, they spent it through the
budget, and never did away with the bond authorizations. So you carry those bond authorizations forward.
So it's a paper debt, some of it we'll have to eat and pay back, but we pay back the county.
And the rest of it we'll be taking care of legislated. And that's the only real debt
we have. We do, we have just borrowed to hire a second dredge to build, we're having a second
dredge built to serve the towns. It's a big part of what we do for the towns as well.
So you did, yeah, dredging.
The dredging.
I've seen that in my research.
Yeah.
In a single town like Tural could never afford it.
Tural could never afford it.
Yeah, some of the bigger towns like Falmouth-Bonson and Sandwich probably could afford a dredge.
Yeah.
But.
The act of the budget issues, one of the unusual, I think, maybe, well, you know more about
government than I do, but the assembly delegates, the delegates have the option of getting covered
with health insurance.
Right.
75 percent.
Yeah.
That's a huge benefit.
It is a huge benefit.
You think that's something that will be cut, or is that something that is hard to get
rid of once you have it?
Yeah, it's one of those things now that I think, and I'm not even sure how many members
of the assembly actually use it. I'll take advantage of it, but they don't get paid.
So this is one of the incentives for getting good people to participate.
Pretty good incentive.
It is a huge incentive.
So that's why it gets more and more of an incentive.
Anybody that came out, I've been in the private sector for the last 10 years, so I know what
I was paying for the health care before. I went into the public sector. And it's, when
you're self-employed, that's a huge nut.
How many employees are there overall with the county?
About 215.
215, okay. I couldn't find that figure anyways.
Right, so we've got a county government that provides regional services. A lot of the towns
on the Cape are pretty small and would be very difficult for them to provide all those
services themselves.
Where's the overlap? Are there areas that you think should be beefed up as far as what
the county is doing or decreased?
You know, I think what we actually have to do, honestly, with county government is to
downsize it just a wee bit and get it more focused on the mission. Over the years when
revenues were good, county government was, they wanted to be, they wanted to do everything
for everybody. And we got involved in areas we probably shouldn't be involved in.
For example, we gave away a lot of property and a lot of money over the years. We've
got assets in Pocasset, a beautiful 100-acre spread that has become so convoluted and really
restricted in use because of the crazy things that went on over there that would now probably
consider criminal, that drives no revenue and leaves us with a liability. So these are
some of the things we have done foolishly over the years that we have to correct internally.
That's why I asked the state auditor to come in and take a look at our practices present
in the past.
When you say gave away property, a dollar a year. Not only did we give it away, we ripped
down the old country to a for-profit assisted living facility for Maine in one case and
to Gosnell, two pieces of property. Gosnell is a for-profit.
That's a for-profit.
That's a for-profit.
That's a for-profit.
That's a for-profit.
And they should be paying us.
Yeah.
Can that be rectified?
I don't know. The auditor is looking at that now and will make recommendations to us. So
it was just bad business.
Sounds like it.
And these are the kind of things we've got to stop. So where should our focus be? Our
focus should stay, first and foremost, our focus should be on the kind of things we're
doing now and increasing our efforts in those regards.
Stonewater management, alternative water systems, septic water systems that we're working
on it and we're soon ready, I think, ready to start to experiment without here so that
we have affordable replacement systems for septic systems that go sour on us. That's
a huge problem on the Cape with the septic. You've probably read in today's Times the
story about how nitrogen is not only hurting the waterways.
I did see that.
It's hurting the marshes, which is critical to the future of seedlings. It's another thing
we do, by the way. We invested in the Arctic and Dennis, the Aquaculture Research Center,
and they provide 90 percent of the oyster seedlings all through Massachusetts. So it's
a huge positive thing for keeping our bayments clean. So that's where we should really be
focused on.
In the summer, water and septic.
What is the biggest thing?
Water, getting it and getting rid of it in the septic.
Water and filling the voids in areas that the town can't, like purchasing and dispatch
and fire training. Some of the things that, out here where you have volunteer firefighters,
if we didn't have that fire training academy, you'd have to go to full-time firefighters.
In Providence Town alone, that would be about a million and a half dollars a year added to
the budget.
The fire training academy.
It's huge.
It's huge.
Not to mention the issues with the pollution of the soil and the water.
Yeah, I'm not allowed to talk about that. I wish I was, because if we were the only responsible
party there, I'd be saying, mea culpa, mea culpa. We stepped up and offered to resolve
it. In the zone two areas of those wells and the mile wells of 52 reported spills to DEP,
had them to do with us. Most of the spills that we have cleaned on our side have come
from the manufacturers in Hyannis, quite frankly.
How long have you been with the county?
One year, exactly.
Like a rookie.
Yeah, a rookie.
Like a rookie.
I'm a rookie.
What's your biggest frustration so far?
Sometimes it's complicated to get things done politically, but that'll work out over
time.
What's it all good about? What's been the biggest achievement?
I'll tell you what. The thing that's most impressed me about the county is the quality
of the work in our departments. The talent is immense. Our scientists, our lab techs,
our chemists, all the people doing ocean residency work, the floodplain strategy planners. It's
just overwhelming how committed these people are.
That's good to hear.
It makes me just feel positive about keeping up the fight.
Well, that's what we have. We just had a primer on county government. If you get a
quiz next week and somebody asks you, what's your county government doing, you should know.
Primarily, water and septic are the biggest issues. Jack, thanks for coming on the show.
My pleasure, Jack.
Thank you.
Great to be here, sir.
Maybe do a follow-up show with a couple of the assembly delegates.
That would be a great idea.
Maybe one or two of the commissioners and get into the political end of it.
Yep.
Okay, so thanks for watching, but stay tuned for my final take tonight.
Today we learned about our county government, what it provides us on the Cape, how it operates,
and about some of the issues with the budget. You'd be the judge and determine whether our
tax money is being spent wisely.
In future shows, we'll interview some of the assembly delegates and perhaps a couple
of the commissioners, so stay tuned.
Here's Peek's perspective. There's another subject we'd like to explore, internet addiction.
Until we find a knowledgeable expert on the Cape, we'll have to rely on the book that
I just read, Irresistible, The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us
Hooked by Adam Alter.
Do you ever wonder if you or your friends have an internet addiction or social media
addiction?
It seems that everywhere I go, people are on their phones or iPads in restaurants, buses,
airports.
I spotted a group of millennials sitting on a wall outside an airport recently, five of
them, all of them on their phone at the same time.
Then again, I was taking a picture on my phone. My wife was on her phone sitting next
to me, and a couple of other oldies next to us were on their phones.
We all spent time with our grandchildren recently. The little ones learned how to use an iPad
before they were toilet trained.
Many teen girls are addicted to social media, such as Facebook and Instagram. Social media
bullying has become a serious issue for them. Teen boys and young adults can become addicted
to video games such as The World of Warcraft.
One young man flunked out of college because of it. He skipped classes, playing World of
Warcraft for 20 hours a day, never leaving his apartment. He ordered food deliveries
and crashed to sleep for just a few hours when he was exhausted.
Adults binge on Netflix episodes.
How many of you have watched four or five episodes of Breaking Bad in one sitting? I
have. Pedestrian deaths and auto fatalities are up significantly. Some of this is attributed
to distracted driving and walking while texting.
70% of office emails are opened within six seconds of receipt, diverting employees from
important tasks. These are some of the examples of potentially addictive internet behaviors.
Alter describes current research in the field and how tech game companies, Netflix and others
produce apps and games and TV programs that are potentially addictive for some.
The book Irresistible by Author. Pick it up and download it to your Kindle and iPad and
engage in a little addictive behavior yourself.
Thanks for watching Peak Time. Stay safe out there.
