Unopposed pols can model best civic service
Franklin County voters are noticing that four countywide offices – coroner, engineer, recorder and sheriff – are uncontested.
Coroner Anahi Ortiz, Engineer Cornell R. Robertson, Recorder Danny O’connor and Sheriff Dallas L. Baldwin are guaranteed new four-year terms.
Uncontested races offer incumbents an opportunity to go the extra mile to educate the public about the office’s function, history and current challenges.
At a time when civic literacy is low and disinformation runs high, the need for officeholders and candidates serving as fact-based educators is as important as ever.
This is no criticism of these four incumbents. Each has served the community in myriad ways, holds the respect of professional peers and is accessible for speaking engagements on topics related to their offices.
In addition, the websites of all four offices provide much detail on their statutory obligations, expansion of duties and evolution of practices.
Ideally, officeholders and candidates in uncontested races can set a high standard for civic education, create pressure for those in contested races to do the same, and over time begin to change the trajectory of our demagogic and destructive political campaigns.
Like many public offices, these four have roots as English institutions transplanted to America during the colonial period. Old England was divided into shires, the equivalent of counties. And each shire had a representative, called a reeve, who answered to the king. As the English language evolved, the shire reeve became the sheriff.
In today’s Franklin County, the sheriff has nearly 1,200 employees, an annual budget approaching $170 million, an average daily jail census of more than 1,900 prisoners and specialized units as diverse as a dive team, bomb squad and hostage negotiators.
The coroner, a specialist in legal and forensic medicine, for centuries has been indispensable to enlightening judges and juries in the investigation of murders as well as nonlethal injuries.
The Roman historian Suetonius recorded that a physician named Antisius determined that of the 23 wounds inflicted on Julius Caesar, the one that penetrated the thorax was the cause of death.
In 2018, the Franklin County coroner’s office performed 1,145 autopsies, transported 1,892 bodies, conducted 1,333 scene investigations and produced 1,781 toxicology reports.
In addition, Ortiz has helped lead task forces determined to reduce overdose deaths, suicides and other tragedies that become statistics in her office.
Until 1935, the engineer officially was designated as the county surveyor. The office was critical in frontier Ohio, when land titles and boundary lines frequently were in dispute.
Although best known today for maintaining 260 miles of roads and 359 bridges, the engineer has ultimate responsibility for maintaining detailed property ownership maps – essential to having an accurate tax base and reliable property boundaries.
The recorder, with 48 employees and a budget approaching $4 million, last year recorded 37,410 deeds and 46,409 mortgages as well as dozens of other types of documents.
Ohio’s recorders trace their origin to public land registrars in colonial America. In O’connor’s 21st century office, deeds and other records now are processed electronically, substantially reducing the amount of time required for transactions. Lucas Sullivant, the county’s first recorder, most likely would be impressed.