The county auditor went to prison on federal corruption charges.

The county sheriff resigned under pressure.

And the county budget was a mess, in part because of contract cost overruns and payroll bloated by patronage.

It was 1979 and voters in Summit County were fed up. Efforts to reform county government earlier that decade failed, but a group of corporate leaders, Akron Beacon Journal editors and elected officials got together and tried again.

Their plan: Adopt a charter and change from a county commissioner form of government to an elected county executive and council.

Their slogan: "Vote yes on Issue 2. It's got to be better."

Sound familiar?

Cuyahoga County voters must decide in November whether to overhaul their own government amid an ongoing federal corruption investigation aimed at top county leaders.

Two competing proposals are on the ballot:

A group led by county Prosecutor Bill Mason wants voters to pass a charter that would eliminate the county commissioners and divide their power between an elected county executive and an elected 11-member county council. All other elected positions, except for prosecutor, would be gone.

County commissioners want voters to pass a plan that would form a charter commission to study what changes are needed.

The political battle over reform is already hot and will likely grow hotter as the election draws near.

Many opponents of Mason's plan -- mostly elected officials -- say a county executive form of government is unnecessary, pointing out that all Ohio counties but Summit work fine with commissioners.

Opponents of the commissioner's alternative say there have been enough studies.

Previous reform efforts have withered for lack of interest.

Are there lessons to be learned from Summit County's experience a generation ago?

"The time is ripe for reform in Cuyahoga County now, just like it was ripe in Summit County then," said Kenneth Cox, a Democrat and former state senator from Summit who was instrumental in the change.

When Ohio counties were set up, he said, they were rural governments without much complexity or responsibility, so commissioners made sense. But cities and big suburbs have popped up, followed by an increased need for services, complicated federal programs to administer and other duties.

Cox said a commissioner form of government wasn't designed to handle these demands, and when he recognized that in the 1970s, he sponsored a constitutional amendment in the legislature to allow citizens to petition the government for a county charter.

After lawmakers passed the plan, Cox and then-Summit County Commissioner John Morgan, a Democrat, quietly began shopping charter plans. They gained the support of corporate leaders, the Beacon Journal and a citizen reform group called Goals for Greater Akron.

Morgan, retired now, living in Barberton, said he's giggling from afar as he watches the Cuyahoga County drama unfold. He said that like many elected Cuyahoga County officials now, Summit politicians opposed reform then.

"They were status quo people," Morgan said.

But Cox, Morgan and others pushing reform anticipated that. They thought many elected county jobs should be wiped out, but intentionally started small, targeting only the commissioners.

And to soothe commissioner complaints and head off any opposition campaign the commissioners might launch -- like what is happening now in Cuyahoga County -- the reform group built the commissioners into their plan.

The sitting commissioners could automatically slide into three of the seven newly created council seats. Although the council members would earn less than half of what commissioners were paid, the reform allowed commissioners to maintain their salaries for two years.

At the same time, the reform group began to expose waste in the commissioner system. Among other things, Morgan said he revealed the politics of hiring workers.

"You couldn't just hire one person to fill a job," Morgan said. "You had to hire three to keep everyone happy."

Voters accepted the charter in 1979, making Summit the first county in Ohio to adopt one.

The next year, all three commissioners ran for county executive. Morgan won.

Not unlike 2009, the economy was battered in 1980. Morgan said the first thing he did as the executive was lay off 200 of the executive branch's 1,100 employees, including 22 secretaries.

At the time, secretaries needed to know shorthand to do their jobs, Morgan said, "and 20 of those 22 didn't know what shorthand was."

Since then, Summit County voters have repeatedly tweaked their charter. They stuck with the county executive, but expanded the council, creating districts aimed at getting blacks and Republicans elected to office, and eliminated other elected jobs.

Has the reform paid off?

It streamlined parts of government.

It helped Republicans and blacks get elected to county positions in what had been an overwhelmingly white Democratic government.

And Cox said reform increased transparency. County Council is required to meet in public. He said commissioners often avoided state open meetings law by gathering two-at-a-time in private.

Yet 30 years after reform passed, the Beacon Journal again writes about patronage in county government; candidates for county executive pledge to change the status quo; and in 2000, the county executive, Tim Davis, decided against seeking a fourth term after his chief of staff, his general counsel and a consultant were all convicted of taking bribes in a kickback scandal during a federal corruption investigation.

Cox said the corruption convictions were a disappointment.

"But if I had it to do all over, I'd get reform done again," he said. "There's no government system that you can set up that's any better than the officials you elect to those positions."