More Depressing Evidence of County Government Incompetence
Posted August 20, 2008
The recent tragic failure of the county's Byzantine 911 system was not an isolated incident,
according to a report that had warned county commissioners that just this sort of thing
was likely to happen if they didn't address chronic problems.
A quotation from
an early Atlanta Journal-Constitution story about this incident:
"We've known in the medical community that that dispatch center has been seriously under-performing
for 10 years," Dr. Eric Ossmann, medical director for Grady Health System's ambulance service, said Wednesday.
Grady's 911 ambulance calls went through the Fulton County center until last year.
An excerpt from
a more recent AJC story on the 911 debacle:
Tom Andrews, who retired as county manager last year, said civil service protections that require documented progressive
discipline and allows for a series of appeals are too protective of bad employees. "We have fired people," Andrews said.
"It's a long and tortuous process. Does it affect overall management? Certainly it does."
Unfortunately, the way county officials have responded to criticism of one of its operations is
painfully reminiscent of how the county's commissioners and its attorney responded to charges of
racism among the managers of county libraries eight years ago.
The familiar pattern so far:
- formal complaints from individuals (including alarmed county employees) fall on deaf ears
- no one in the county bureaucracy takes responsibility for correcting complained-about incidents
- county officials adamantly maintain that any systemic problems or dangerous patterns exist
- unfavorable publicity results in the county paying for
an expensive, independent investigation.
We predict that the rest of the story will unfold according to the following infuriating, familiar pattern:
- the commissioners will ignore the study's findings and recommendations
- a lawsuit will be reluctantly filed by one or more victims of the county's ineptitude and indifference
- at the instruction of a majority of the county commissioners, the lawsuit will be dragged out for years,
and the county attorney will punctuate the expensively-winding path of the lawsuit with further public
denials of any wrongdoing by county employees, despite the existence of an abundance of evidence to the contrary
- the lawsuit will be eventually be expensively settled in favor of the plaintiffs, accompanied by
excoriating remarks by the judges involved.
And yet commissioners continue to wonder why there is next-to-zero confidence in county governance
among local voters. Apparently most of the commissioners choose to gamble on voter amnesia and the short
attention span of the local media about county government problems, hoping that a combo of these two factors will
allow them to continue governance-as-usual.
What's this got to do with county libraries?
What this year's avoidable 911 breakdown, the continuing avoidable mess at the county jail, the avoidable fatal shootings
at the county courthouse in 2005, the avoidable library race discrimination lawsuit of 2000, and the numerous other recent
eruptions of county ineptitude and wastefulness have in common is that those patterns -
and county citizens' memories of those patterns - form part of the context of this fall's library bond referendum.
Now it's not only the suddenly-higher pricetag of the upcoming library referendum that jeopardizes its approval among voters.
Referendum supporters must now cope with the the growing fed-up-ness among Fulton County citizens with yet another instance
of reform-resistant county commissioners.
Will voters be willing to hold their noses come November and vote for improving the county's library
system, we wonder? Or are voters fast reaching the point where the majority will be unwilling to invest
another extra nickel in county-run operations of any kind?
If voters can't bring themselves to approve this fall's library referendum because of the exposures of fundamental problems
throughout other departments of county government, the county's library service would become yet another victim of the
county commission's stubborn refusal to embrace fundamental reform.
What a shame that library administrators and supporters will have to fight so much harder to win support for the library
bond referendum than they would if the county commissioners had spent the past ten years earning a growing respect among
citizens instead of a growing disgust with it.
AFPLWATCH stories posted in July 2008
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