That's the question posed to me by a county supervisor at Tuesday's La Crosse County Board retreat.

He seemed a bit peeved at me for suggesting the board deal with the question of its size sooner than later because of the difficulty in coordinating district boundaries with the city of La Crosse.

Who am I to tell the board what to do?

I'm just a taxpayer and a voter like everyone else. I was writing in my column (as opposed to a straight news story), which gives me a bit of license to offer my own opinion.

And I'll admit I was advocating on behalf of former supervisor Jim Ehrsam, who believes the board is going to have to reduce its size. I don't know if Ehrsam shares my urgency in starting work this early on the problem. But I've watched this board and the common council operate for more than a decade, and I know it takes a while to turn around a battleship.

During the goal-setting portion of the retreat I heard some supervisors discuss whether board size ought to be one of their priorities for the coming year. Let's just say the idea didn't make it out of committee.

Given the board's priorities (economic development, collaboration with other governments, sustainability initiatives and developing a regional transit system), I'd agree that county board size isn't as important. But that doesn't mean somebody in authority at the county shouldn't start taking with somebody in authority at the city about the issue sometime before it's too late to have a thorough public discussion about the size of the board sometime before the 2010 census.

Maybe that discussion comes out in favor of the status quo. Maybe it doesn't. But our elected representatives owe it to the voters to have a meaningful public discussion about board and council size sometime sooner than later.