Efficient Inefficiency

The judge laid down the law.

The chairman of the county commission heard and carried the message back to the board.

We need to get the work on the county courthouses in Port St. Joe and Wewahitchka, he told commissioners, and we need to get them done now.

The judge made it “perfectly clear” it was to be a priority, finish the work to transform courtrooms into decent workspaces, with sturdy seats and non-sieve ceilings – those pesky luxuries – and fix an elevator that is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

And everybody can deduce what “perfectly clear” entailed.

Time for action, correct?

Time to stop wasting time which can be counted now not in days, weeks or months but in years and taxpayer dollars in a haphazard effort and complete the work at the county’s two signature government buildings, right?

Hardly.

What ensued after the chairman’s motion last week to devote all maintenance work to the courthouses until the work was completed was the kind of reaction that is seen in three-year-olds when Thomas the Train is taken away.

Commissioner Carmen McLemore, who based on comments apparently has some kind of man-servant within the maintenance department that is his, well, property, protested that he needed this man for a project Mr. McLemore had him working on.

Mr. McLemore needed him today, tomorrow and in the near future.

Commissioner Billy Traylor followed with how this focusing of maintenance people on, heaven forbid, maintenance, fits in for “my district.”

This government of quid pro quo, what’s in it for me?

And Commissioner Bill Williams wants to toot his horn that after five years in office the county is, finally, taking one of the steps he advocated when first running – a work order system? Whoo-hoo.

Here the county faces potential legal action, has put aside the funds and promised not just a county judge but a circuit judge to get things fixed at the courthouses and at least two commissioners are more concerned, still, about “their” districts.

How refreshing it would be to hear out of the meeting room of the Robert Moore Annex words reflecting an attitude of “my county” rather than “my district.”

“My employees” and “working my district” there is an “I” in commissioner in Gulf County.

Good luck to Commissioner Warren Yeager when he argues that everybody employed by the county, including commissioners, should adhere to the work order system, that micromanaging the county and operating on a daily basis at the whims of commissioners’ emergencies had to end.

Good luck because that is what consolidation is about.

Commissioners can pat themselves on the back all they want and toss out numbers to reflect that savings may not be here but they are coming, but consolidation of departments is all about micromanaging.

Consolidation is about placing several large departments in one commissioner’s district, about increasing that commissioner’s ability to micromanage departments just as Mr. McLemore, that commissioner, has done at the road department for years.

Even in their secret code that elected officials seem to learn upon entering office, a kind of pig Latin intended to confound the public, commissioners all but acknowledge that the savings, if any, from consolidation will be realized down the road.

The only consolidation being realized this year, and henceforth, is the consolidation of power in a single district, “my district, as Mr. McLemore so often puts it.

That is what single-member districts have wrought, a single-minded mentality.

Commissioners, by design of re-election rather than something crazy like public service, are all but compelled to adopt a mentality that once in office it is no longer your county – they just have to concern themselves with one-fifth.

The rest, as Mr. McLemore has so magnanimously said, can be walled up and forgotten about.

The only concern need be “my district” and “my employees.”

So what guesses out there for the amount of time it takes for one commissioner to determine that “my district” has an emergency, somewhere among the mere 20 percent of voters who have a say over their seat, so work order schmork-order.

Just haul in some of “my employees” and get the job done.

What is frightening is that all this whining was about maintenance employees and their schedules for the foreseeable future, courtrooms and an elevator, relatively small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.

But if commissioners can procrastinate over a minor item, delay the “county’s” work for work in “their district,” over courthouse repairs, consider the thought processes in play when something, such as the budget or economic development as two examples, are on the table.

  Legally, maybe the county or a circuit judge will have enough and hold commissioners in contempt. Maybe jail one or five.

What certainly continues to grow in the public is contempt for this kind of government inefficiency. This is not exactly the kind of comic relief folks are looking for these days.