Letter: Where is Carson City’s Mary Poppins?

Even the wise, kind and responsible Disney nanny character would face a daunting task were she presented with the continuing public policy fiascos in our troubled town. Mary handled her unbridled charges with aplomb and urgency. Many of our elected and appointed officials need to employ these traits.

State Fair
Even though Reno closed its state fair for lack of interest a few years ago, Carson City officials recently voted to gamble $75,000 of scarce general fund money on a sesquicentennial party. Aren’t existing Nevada Day festivities sufficient when public money is forever short and tax/rate hikes don’t resolve recurring city funding problems?

City Animal Shelter
After two grossly unqualified management hires at the city animal shelter, the city manager picked a terminated city manager he knew from Washington state as interim shelter manager with no animal experience. Animal volunteer groups paid for a 2010 study from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) that laid out the many problems and solutions needed at the shelter when the city claimed “it had no money” for such an effort. HSUS’ constructive solutions have been largely ignored, and the sponsoring volunteer groups were branded as ‘negative’ for questioning the lack of progress, as well as summarily excluded from any further input or meetings with the city manager and the department manager.

The department manager in charge of the shelter through the multiple management and community involvement failures was recently rewarded with a 25% salary increase and appointed to a newly-created deputy city manager position without an open selection process. The city has subsequently hitched its wagon to just one animal welfare group, CASI, which wants to raise money for a new building at least a decade from reality. Meanwhile, no one is attempting to comprehensively address the festering sub-standard conditions and deficient procedures three years after the HSUS findings.

Much like nursing home inhabitants, city animal shelter inhabitants are relatively powerless, suffer anxiety and physical ills, and, lack the ability to speak for themselves, vote or make campaign contributions; they are at the mercy of humans who often see their needs as an irrelevant footnote when new civic edifices and questionable programs are arbitrarily deemed ‘priorities.’

Never forget it is painless to dole out other people’s money. When the city animal shelter failed to follow its own procedures and put Rollie the dog to an unnecessary death, the dog’s owner rightfully sued the city. City management quickly proposed paying the owner $41,000 to settle out of court. At the very least shouldn’t this payment have been subtracted from the city manager’s discretionary budget since it was his failed management that allowed this situation to occur after ignoring multiple problems spanning many years? The dog’s owner didn’t have $100 to retrieve her dog before it was inappropriately killed, but now, after paying her lawyer, the owner will retain north of $25,000 in tax-free public money. Since negligent city managers are not personally paying the settlement with salary deductions, a more appropriate sum from the public’s treasury would have been $5,000 to $10,000. It is also worth noting that if the dog’s owner genuinely cared about animal welfare, she would have donated most of her settlement to animal protection organizations rather than pursuing a personal financial bonanza.

Incoherent Compensation
On another front, city taxpayers are paying for a compensation consultant, Minnesota-based Pontifex, which is using positions in much larger jurisdictions than Carson City (Washoe County, North Las Vegas, Clark County/Las Vegas) to establish a salary grade range for our library director position and other city staff. It is a nationwide marketplace for jobs given the applicants for the open library director position, yet Pontifex only surveyed Nevada jurisdictions and also failed to include the local state librarian’s salary grade range. These errors and omissions were brought to the attention of the city’s human resources director, who manages this consulting contract. Her response to these facts was “it is up to the library board to establish a salary and perform a second compensation study if it doesn’t approve of human resources’ consultant.” No, it is up to the human resources director to question her consultant’s methodology for establishing salary grade ranges when there are obvious flaws so the final result is an equitable one for the employee and city taxpayers that doesn’t require a second project. The actual salary agreed on between employee and employer is a completely separate issue. Unfortunately, she steadfastly refuses to do her job in this instance and the city manager has taken no action to correct the situation.

Ill-Kept Water and Sewer Systems
Let’s not omit the long-neglected sewer and water systems, which are projected to require Band Aid repairs for the next five years totaling $50 million, and another $150 million, plus inflation bumps, over the following 15 years, per the Public Works department’s analysis. If we know that tighter environmental regulations, age-related equipment/facility failures and/or hoped-for population growth will ultimately require a completely new sewage treatment plant, why aren’t we applying the 1/8% sales tax that hasn’t been allotted to other purposes and constructing a state-of-the-art sewer plant now rather than allowing inflation to catapult the cost far beyond the current $135 million? Dithering with relatively discretionary items such as taxpayer-funded ‘redevelopment’ of the north and east business districts is equally foolish when core city services and facilities are neglected. Boosting water and sewer rates year after year will only make life more unaffordable and tenuous for seniors and low-income residents struggling with rapid inflation in life’s basic necessities.

More Examples of the Outrageous
If all of the above weren’t enough, material public money (hotel room tax plus sales tax) is destined to indefinitely subsidize a superfluous railroad. Added into the equation are the following: the desperate desire for a new multi-purpose athletic center when existing public schools and the Community Center have indoor gymnasiums; reconfiguring Carson Street with no solid evidence of its efficacy; untallied spending to promote an unnecessary library; a largely wasted Pony Express Shed; and, a long list of external city consultants. The surfeit of deputy department directors and management staff has not been pruned; at a minimum they could be doing much of the work farmed out to external consultants.

You would be hard pressed to read any of these facts or management snafus in the local print newspaper; these glaring deficiencies are too inconvenient for those Carson City officials who principally covet power, continued employment and a generous future pension. Hopefully an informed and questioning public will continue calling for changes in the way city officials conduct the public’s business from today until the 2014 election cycle. Photo ops and ribbon cuttings occupy the most minor and insignificant place on the civic agenda.

We need our officials to exhibit true public leadership by developing action items that address the fundamental problems our community faces. We do not need more public buildings and endless programs with fuzzy deliverables. The average Carson City mom runs a better operation than many of the city’s officials. So I repeat: Where are you, Mary Poppins, of any gender, when your resolute leadership is needed to save our town from repeated ineptness?