Tuesday, March 29, 2005

What's news?

Above the fold:
(photo of March 24 newspaper, above the fold)


Nice big photo of snow on the trees.

Trying to improve traffic flow at the post office.
(Confidential to Fred: if you hadn't given those hundreds of thousands of dollars to the forces of darkness, you could buy a left turn lane and make us all happy...please, next time use your powers for good)

Below the fold:
(photo of March 24 newspaper, below the fold)A crisis: NID's likely to have to raise water rates.

And a Grand Jury report on county mismanagement and intimidation of county government staff by (unnamed) members of the Board of Supervisors.(*)

In a way this is progress; at least the news wasn't obscured by a misleading headline and bumped to the back page.

Yubanet provides text and comments on the Grand Jury report (PDF), which seems a quiet piece of prose. An excerpt of the least quiet parts:
  • Numerous sources confirm that in recent years, members of the Board of Supervisors have publicly criticized and demeaned department heads during BOS meetings.
  • Some employees have reported feeling vulnerable and fearful of losing their jobs whenever there is a change in the BOS majority because current and former CEOs have not always acted as a "buffer" between the BOS and County department heads.
  • Neglect of crucial fiscal matters in at least one department in the past was eventually discovered through a change in leadership and corrected by Administration staff.
  • A climate of fear exists when employees see managers being publicly demeaned by BOS members, high level employees leaving in significant numbers, and what they perceive as micro-management occurring

Those gentle (post-election) newspaper editorials match the report's tone nicely.
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1 comment:

  1. Anna Haynes3/30/2005 10:13 PM

    Hi Russ, thanks for your comment.

    I find it very frustrating to read a report like that one, whose publication is presumably supposed to benefit the public in some way, and find that it's primarily a he-said-she-said document that never bothers to share any evidence upon which I could draw my own conclusions. Result: it becomes a Rorschach test for the preconceptions of the reader.
    For example: is the report using "micromanagement" literally, or as a euphemism? There's "setting policy to the last millimeter" micromanagement, and there's "that guy contributed to the wrong candidate, so don't give him the variance he's asking for" micromanagement. And - never having worked there, and only having heard one story (of the latter ilk, from many years ago) - I can't say.

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