A decade ago, Randy Horiuchi and I stood on opposite ends of the debate over whether to change Salt Lake County's form of government.

I was a proponent of scrapping the commission system, in which three at-large commissioners presided over the vast county, including its populous unincorporated areas, in favor of a council-mayor form. Horiuchi, who was one of the three commissioners at the time, had a seemingly endless stream of reasons to avoid change, with which he pelted me from time to time (23 were packed into one letter).

Once, we both happened to be at the same gas station at the same time, on opposite sides of the same self-serve island. While our pumps gurgled and their meters soared, he took the opportunity to let me know that a county council would have nothing to do, outside of preparing a budget once a year. If we changed the form of government, we would be paying nine council members to work about one month out of 12.

Later, he argued that the change would cause the bureaucracy to grow.

"The tendency will be for a new form of government to balloon," he said.

Well, "Up, up and away!"

A decade after voters overwhelmingly rejected Horiuchi's arguments, but not Horiuchi himself, and approved the change of government, he has found enough work to keep himself busy more than one month of the year.

Horiuchi, who now is one of three at-large County Council members, remembers the gas station encounter and still feels the change in county government was wrong. But he does admit to being wrong about one thing. "I terribly misjudged the nuances of what we do."

And so he has proposed a plan that would allow council members to increase their pay by double, or more, to handle those nuances, which include demands on their time by the public. They could do this by reducing or eliminating the staff with which they surround themselves. Two of the council members already work without aides. The rest have full-time assistants.

Under Horiuchi's plan, a council member could set his or her own salary, so long as the entire salary of office personnel did not exceed a limit set in the budget. That's important, he says, because the change wouldn't cost taxpayers any more. In fact, he believes it would save money. And to neutralize his opponents, he has already announced that he would not take advantage of his own plan, should it receive a majority vote of the council. He's doing it for all the other hardworking souls who find they are spending 40, 50 or 60 hours a week at a job advertised as part time.

None of which convinces me this isn't a bad idea.