By Lyn Widmyer

I have now been a Jefferson County Commissioner for one year. What have I learned after attending 75 meetings of the commission? Here are a few of my insights.Never leave town during February. I entered office on January 8, 2009 with no clue about what was awaiting me in less than 30 days. In February, property owners can appealtheir tax assessments to the County Commission. Last year homeowners could not believe their tax appraisal was so much higher than market value, es-pecially as the sales prices of homes plummeted week byweek. Unfortunately, the state-mandated tax appraisal period is always in the past, so up-to-date market values cannot be considered. The County Com-mission met 14 times in Feb-ruary to accommodate people  wanting to plead their case. It was a long, grueling process.Never leave town during March. March is budget month. I am proud we got the budget adopted on time after missing state-mandated deadlines two years in a row. It took endless meetings, and left no oppor-tunity for meaningful public input. Equally frustrating was the absence of work programs for county departments that described the types of service and programs being funded. The County Commission has already directed departmentheads to create work programs to go with their budget requests for FY 2011. I am a strong sup-porter of performance-basedbudgeting and will continue to push for that approach.Don’t let your voter reg-istration go stale. Just like unused bread, unused voter  registrations go stale. It takes a little longer for voting registra-tions to go bad: 8 years. Those who don’t vote at least once in that time have to re-register. I learned this fact while certi-fying the elections for zoning and table games. The County Commission must review ev-ery single provisional or chal-lenged ballot, and decide whether or not to allow a ballot to be counted. The easiest bal-lot to reject was the registered voter from Berkeley County who insisted on voting in the table games election. The most rewarding ballot to accept was from a hospital patient who voted while still in the inten-sive care unit. Employees can have their personnel evaluation done in public session. This was a real shocker to me. West Virginia state law requires personnel  evaluations in the government sector to be done in public if requested by the employee.So, the personnel evaluation of the county administrator was done in public, on the web-cam in front of an audience as requested by the employee. I have been evaluated and con-ducted evaluations for over 30 years during my employment in county government. This is the first time I have ever seen an evaluation done in public.Communicating with the public is not easy. Com-mission meetings may all be viewed on the webcam, but I suspect most people don’t have such a high threshold for pain. Residents should be able to go to the County Commission website and find information about key actions, upcoming meetings, and important com-munity announcements. One  of my biggest disappointments is that the webpage was never improved last year. Now that a web expert has been hired, that should change in 2010.I have learned a lot during my “rookie” year on the com-mission. Next year I want to explore the big issues facing Jefferson County, includingjob creation, implementing the Chesapeake Bay environmental standards, promoting history-based tourism, and figuring out how to solve our looming infra-structure problems.But first I must complete a far harder task. I have to clear my house of a year’s worth of agenda packets and back-ground reports.Lyn Widmyer is a Jefferson County Commissioner and oc-casional contributor to The Observer.