Boone County Presiding Commissioner: Dan Atwill
Party: Democratic
Age: 71
Residence: southern Boone County near Columbia
Education: University of Missouri undergraduate; University of Missouri School of Law
Occupation: Boone County Presiding Commissioner
Political experience: Presiding commissioner since 2011
Opponent: Matt Cavanaugh
What makes you the best candidate for this job?
Well, I’ve held this position since 2011. And one of the most important things we do is going on right now and that’s prepare the annual budget. The county has 22 elected officials and the county commission is responsible for 10 other departments, so we have essentially 32 different budgets that are presented to the county commission. Our job along with the auditor is to sort those out, be sure that the greatest efficiency and economy is coming from every person that submits a budget, and their office, and then try to coordinate the greatest needs against those that can wait if we don’t have adequate funding. And that’s usually the case because there are always some big items that need to be taken care of on a year to year basis.
It’s sort of like being a band director where everyone plays a different instrument and in some ways plays from a different songbook, and to try and keep everything organized and going in one direction. Fortunately we have great elected officials and great directors and everyone is very sensitive to the need to keep the budget in line.
We have an outstanding auditor. She is very good at projecting what the revenue will be for the coming year. That’s hard to do, because the budget is funded 70 percent by sales tax. Even though Boone County has grown by 2,000 to 3,000 people every year for the last several years, the revenue from sales tax has not increased significantly or in tandem with the increased population. You would think that would happen, however, you have to realize that a lot of the sales now are going through the internet and even some of the local retail stores are closing. So when that happens sales tax is lost.
There are some possible fixes to that on the horizon, but all these things combined I think help to inform the commission what is needed and make careful or wise decisions about the future of the county.
What will be your top policy priorities if elected to the commission?
Public safety is number one in the minds of the public as far as we can tell at this point.
The sheriff is responsible for public safety in the county, and again we work closely with all elected officials, especially the sheriff, in providing funding for the things that he needs in order to ensure the public is safe. And our sheriff has done an outstanding job.
He does need, because of the increased population that we’re experiencing, he needs more deputies on the road. That’s going to be hard to fund this year. But he’s very careful, very economically minded, very efficient with what he does with revenue that office receives. I think we need to place emphasis on public safety and help in any way we can.
What are the other major issues facing Boone County?
One of the important things that the county has as an obligation is to be sure that, if possible, we have increased job availability. And we’ve done that with the implementation of what is referred to as Chapter 100 arrangements with several different large organizations that have have indicated they would expand or bring new employees to the area.
Over the last few years that has been done with five different organizations, all with great success so far. Of importance is the fact that these arrangements are simply a reduction in personal property and real property taxes for a period of time, and there is no money invested by the taxpayers and no risk involved to the taxpayers in this kind of process. So it has those advantages to the public and at the same time, we acquire hundreds of new jobs from these different organizations over the next two to three years, and that income that’s paid to those employees gets recirculated in the community and you have more taxable sales, more collection of revenue, there will probably be some increase in homeowner sales. It helps to build the momentum of the economy in this area.
Having traveled to several other locations in the last few years, I firmly believe that there is no safe place between stagnation and growth. If you aren’t in a growth mode you’re in a stagnation mode and that is not helpful for anyone in the economy.
Unfortunately some of our neighboring counties are having problems because of a decreasing population. Our situation is the opposite. I’d rather have our problem, but it’s real for some of these smaller counties that don’t have an attraction to businesses or an attraction to even keep their young people and keep them employed in their communities.
Boone County has an advantage in that regard and I think we want to continue to look for opportunities to develop that further.
