Keeping Conley in CAMPO is complicated

My first reaction, when I heard that former Hays County Commissioner Will Conley was turning legalistic pirouettes to remain in charge of the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization board, was simple. Why? You know the expression, “They couldn’t pay me to (whatever)?” Well, the American-Statesman since 2003 has been paying me to go to CAMPO board meetings, and sometimes I still don’t go. I’d say that the monthly get-togethers on the University of Texas campus, where 20 mostly elected officials hash out the area’s transportation intentions, are like watching paint dry. But I have never stared at freshly applied enamel for two hours, so I’m not sure.

They’re in the same ZIP code though, certainly.

That “mostly elected officials” part, it turns out, is what last week’s brief CAMPO flap was all about.

Conley, who had been on the Hays County Commissioners Court since 2004, resigned in October so he could run to be on it again. Huh? Well, Conley wants to be the Hays County judge, the person holding the gavel at the county board, and state law says that once he began running for that job (to be decided in November) he had to give up the lesser position.

The reasonable assumption might have been that he would simultaneously give up the chairmanship of the CAMPO board and spend that Monday night once a month otherwise engaged, leaving the Commissioners Court to appoint one of their number to the transportation board. Beyond that, anyone pondering such things (a small faction, I’ll admit) might have presumed that some law or rule would mandate that he leave the volunteer CAMPO board.

No, in both cases, as it happens.

Federal law, as the Austin Monitor reported when it scooped the world on the Conley matter, says that the members of metropolitan planning organizations should be local elected officials, state officials or “officials of public agencies that administer or operate major modes of transportation in the metropolitan area.” Seemingly, as of October, Conley would have been none of those things, because that last category is how Capital Metro and the Texas Department of