When Bonnie Wiscombe spends money for roads on behalf of the taxpayers in Marion Township, there’s no one looking over her shoulder – except two fellow board members.

There are no professional staff members to review the books, no yearly audits to make sure there’s nothing fishy happening.

“There’s not much regulation in place, I don’t think,” said Wiscombe, one of nine elected township trustees in Douglas County. “The honor system is what’s in place. For the honor system to work, you have to have honorable people.”

But a recent crime raises the question of whether the honor system is enough.

Last week, the wife of the former Willow Springs township treasurer in southern Douglas County pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $114,000 in taxpayer money. For two years, Shelley Ausherman wrote checks to herself from the township’s account, then altered them to make it appear they were being spent for legitimate township uses such as road rock.

“I just can’t see how she really did it, unless they were real lax on their books,” said Eugene Westerhouse, trustee of Eudora Township.

• Treasurer’s wife guilty in $114,000 embezzlement (12-1-05)
• Missing funds from Willow Springs Township probed (06-29-05)

The only reason the Willow Springs embezzlement was discovered is that historically, the county’s staff has helped townships prepare annual reports. A county employee spotted the problem earlier this year.

“If we hadn’t been assisting in that role, we would not have had a means to discover it, and I don’t know whether it would have been discovered or not,” County Administrator Craig Weinaug said. “They’re not required to be audited.”

Townships are an old-fashioned idea, originally drawn up so that they would be small enough to be traveled by horse. They provide basic needs such as fire service and road maintenance to people who live outside the city limits.

Today, their relationship to county government is murky at best. For example, Eudora trustee Westerhouse described townships as “the little dog underneath the county commissioners.”

“They’re our boss,” he said.

But Weinaug said, “We can jawbone and try to persuade them how to do things, but we ultimately don’t have any authority over the townships.”

Some townships require multiple signatures on checks. Willow Springs didn’t before the embezzlement, but now it does.

“You always close the door after the horse gets out,” said Jay Robertson, Lecompton Township trustee. “It really surprises me that they only required one signature on a check.”

Even if the county can’t tell townships what to do, it could take a few actions that would strip them of their major roles. For example, in recent years there’s been discussion of switching to a “unit roads” system in which the county would take over maintenance for roads now overseen by the townships.

But many people in rural areas oppose the idea. After all, the farmer down the road who serves on the township board is more accessible than someone in an office at the county courthouse.

“We’ve had a running dialogue on this issue for three or four years now, and I imagine we’ll continue that discussion,” County Commission Chairman Charles Jones said.

Will the Willow Springs scandal affect that debate? Both Jones, a proponent of unit roads, and Commissioner Jere McElhaney, an opponent of unit roads, said they didn’t think so.

Weinaug said he didn’t think the scandal in Willow Springs was “the tip of any iceberg.”

“I think it’s going to cause people to become aware of township governments,” he said. “Whether it will lead to some kind of significant change, I don’t know.”