After working in the private sector for four decades, I'm five years into my first major outing as a government bureaucrat. At the outset I resolved not to turn into a stereotype of a government worker – uncreative, cold, by-the-book, just marking time until retirement.
Well . . . I'll be vested in the retirement plan in a few months. After so few years the benefits would be almost negligible, but it's a milestone and I have to admit that I'm worn down enough that it's starting to look like a finish line.
The sick economy and falling tax revenues have forced cuts at all levels of government. Positions have been eliminated, job duties combined, work hours reduced – the government work force in my county has dropped 15% since 2008. Also reduced: Health insurance benefits, cost of living salary adjustments and take-home pay, due to mandatory days off without pay. But citizen expectations and the need to provide essential services have not decreased.
Where once the goal was to provide better service to more people, now managers are hard put just to keep essential services running. One manager I know describes what he's doing as “playing Whack-a-Mole against an army of moles.” As resources shrink, crises multiply; paperwork piles up; and statutory deadlines start to scream like incoming artillery shells. A few months ago I made an emergency visit to the medical center with chest pains. I thought it was a heart attack. Turned out to just be stress.
Now, even as government's ability to provide basic services is being tested, a well-organized campaign has emerged that, by all appearances, is aimed at undermining the legitimacy of representative democracy itself.
On our little island of fewer than 6,000 souls, cartoons in ads placed in the local weekly portray the beleaguered County government as everything from a demon to a giant python squeezing the life out of property owners because it's doing a state-required update of land use regulations.
Anti-government activists as a group have adopted bullying tactics, calling out mid-level employees by name Our code enforcement officer has received abusive emails locally and from literally all over the country after a property rights group posted and promoted a video smear job online, along with the employee's name and email address. His offense? Sending a letter of inquiry to someone who was running a store in an unpermitted building in an area which was not zoned for the purpose.
It's worth taking a moment to stop and consider something: County employees live in the same community, attend the same churches, send their kids to the same schools, pay the same taxes and live under the same regulations as everyone else in the County. Anything they do might do that would hurt the community would hurt themselves and their families as well.
The ersatz video exposé, made by the “Freedom Foundation,” spun a story that the County had ordered the store operator, a hardworking farmer, to close down his store or spend tens of thousands of dollars upgrading the property. Even though all relevant “facts” in the video have been discredited the video remains online and people still send out links to it.
Public meetings on land use regulations increasingly, are packed with property rights activists, who take advantage of public access time to consume hours reciting talking points excoriating the County's planning staff and elected officials, seldom letting facts get in the way of a good jibe.
The public debate has increasingly become dominated by private citizens who openly scorn the community leaders they voted into office just months earlier, and denigrate the people who do the things necessary to keep the community viable, healthy and safe, and manage the infrastructure that allows commerce to take place.
In this atmosphere, it would be easy to take cover in the rulebook, not show any flexibility or creativity in dealing with problems, and to just hang on tight until retirement.
But few of us want to live that way. It's our community too.
Citizens, especially when they are in trouble, like to remind us that we work for them. We do appreciate that, and just about every government employee I know works hard for their fellow taxpayers. If we screw up, we expect to hear about it. But we are human, and we'd really appreciate it if our fellow taxpayers - the ones not employed in public service - tried a little harder during these tough times to be good bosses.
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