Zachary Oren Smith for the Press-Citizen:
The Johnson County Board of Supervisors has a vacancy, but unless you are one of the 350 or so delegates for the local Democrats, you won’t have much of a say in who fills it.
I’ve made a light mockery of the “who’s running?!” intrigue surrounding the Johnson County Board of Supervisors vacancy, but this is why: the choice will be limited to a tiny number of folks. (For the record: I am not one of them.)
The county government deserves coverage. But reporting resources are extremely constrained. Should those resources be devoted to writing profiles of five declared candidates, remembering that there could be a nomination from the floor we don’t even expect?
County government deserves real coverage. So let’s reflect: almost everyone was surprised by the resignation; where’s the coverage of how we got here? How did we have a supervisor who, allegedly, was putting in just six hours of work each week, or, as another supervisor wrote, “both literally and figuratively calling it in”?