Each year, county department heads prepare performance measures to help explain what their department will accomplish during the coming year with the tax dollars requested.

Performance measures include a statement of goals, complete with designated benchmarks for measuring and evaluating the progress the department makes towards fulfilling its mission to the community.

This year performance measures were required of all county department heads. The district attorney did not meet the deadline. What Josh Marquis provided did not contain the type of information required by the budget committee to evaluate how the tax dollars would provide safety services to the public.

Marquis’s primary statement of how he would measure the success of his department was by the increased number of employees he gained according to the recommendation of a staffing study conducted of his department by the county.

In other words, Marquis wants the taxpayers to provide him a blank check. Marquis provided no explanation of how additional employees would increase the public’s safety, what measurements he would use to establish the current level of the public’s safety, or how he would show any progress for the year.

It is a fact that Marquis has always had the ability to reinstate the county’s supplemental pay by providing the budgetary information requested. He was told so in a memorandum distributed the day the board of county commissioners adopted the 2007-08 Budget on June 27, 2007.

After months of not receiving any written proposal from Marquis, the board offered him a Memorandum of Understanding to clarify our intent to pay him for preparing the requested information. It is solid public policy to have a written understanding of what money is paid in return for specific services rendered. Further, Marquis has been required to provide performance measures to the state. Why not provide this information to the budget committee?

Neither the budget committee nor the board of county commissioners seeks to control the district attorney. The duties, responsibility and authority of the district attorney are specified in state law, not county law.

Ballot Measure 4-123 will not increase or decrease the independence of the district attorney. It will not change the legal requirement for Marquis to provide the requested budgetary information. But, Measure 4-123 would dictate a required amount of Clatsop County tax dollars be spent to pay a state employee, the district attorney.

Richard Lee

Ann Samuelson

Jeff Hazen

Patricia Roberts

Clatsop County Commissioners