Peter C Meyer's Marin County Service
A Note to Marin County Taxpayers
La Antigua Guatemala 2012
I was your elected County Clerk and Registrar of voters from 1974 to 1982. Our Marin population was then 208,000 compared to today’s 252,000, a 17% growth. My immediate predecessor was George Gnoss. He was allowed one assistant and provided all of the needed clerical support for both the Superior Court and the County Board of Supervisors just as the County Clerks had done for many decades before him. I followed in his footsteps and by today’s dollars my salary would be roughly $150.000 per year. Soon after my term ended however the position of County Clerk was all but eliminated and handed to two professional administrators, called the County Administrator and the Court Administrator.
I see that the former now works with seven assistants (not one) who
make over $100,000 each and the latter has built a similar empire with a
huge staff and many assistants. What was in decades past accomplished
with a handful of hard working lowly paid clerical helpers has in the
last thirty years become a multi-million dollar operation.
The new Court and County
administrators enjoy a combined salary of nearly half a million dollars,
not the $150,000 you would be paying the County Clerk. Maybe George
Gnoss my predecessor was right when in 1973 he said in parting: “These
new administrators will bankrupt us, we have invited the fox to guard
the henhouse.”
