Sometimes It Lasts in Love; Sometimes It Hurts Instead

We all live in DeKalb County – some of us all our lives. We all want DeKalb County to be great, to provide great services.  We want to be proud of where we live. Sometimes we are. But we all recognize that there are some management problems here. And it’s not just indictments, jail terms and plea bargains; it’s a mass of complete inefficiency and terrible fiduciary relationship to the voters.

Some people say “there have always been theft, fraud and waste in the County”.  OK; it’s not a new phenomenon.  But that’s a pretty awful excuse for the last few years. And if that’s what we have to look forward to, we should all probably be looking for new homes.

Clearly an effective way of reducing the problem is to put different parts of the cookie jar in different areas.  Charter school clusters will go a long way to reduce the ability of the central school staff to hand out favors, or play games with construction projects.

The same is true in the general government of the county.  If zoning is handled locally, it’s probably going to be pretty easy to identify graft; and very easy to stop it. If roads and sidewalks are handled locally, voters are going to know when their representative is not watching what goes on. If police are all local, you’re going to know when they don’t show up for work.

I wish that the DeKalb government could be “fixed”. But changing the form of government is not going to change the commissioners who keep getting elected. And it’s not going to change the ability of officers or employees to game the system. We need to pull some of the activities and resources out of their slush fund.

Robert Wittenstein, a former council member at Dunwoody, recently said that “the second worst employment problem in DeKalb County is absenteeism; the worst problem is presenteeism.” I’ve had plenty of experience seeing our county government at “work”; you can watch a few people actually working, and the others doing something to look busy. Take some of that away from them, and put it in a place and format where people either work or leave.

Let us manage our own resources.