I was somewhat saddened to hear about the resignation of Archuleta County Administrator Bentley Henderson, and Archuleta County Attorney Todd Starr.
Not because I fear for the future of our community… nor because I’m worried about the future facing Mr. Henderson and Mr. Starr on account of their decisions to leave our employ.
No, I was saddened because the person I would most like to see resign from the County is Commissioner Steve Wadley. And we seem to be stuck with him for another 30 months, until he is term limited.
Let me explain, by first referencing a research paper written in 1990 by J. Norman Baldwin, a professor of political science at the University of Alabama:
“In contrast to the private sector, the public sector inhibits motivation because rewards are rarely contingent upon performance, narrow position classifications create un-enriched and un-enlarged jobs, the monopolistic nature of government prevents stimulating competition, and the ambiguity of the goals prevents the development of performance standards for effective incentive systems.”
We’ve often heard the (cynical?) suggestion that, if only government could operate more like a business and less like a bureaucracy, we would waste fewer taxpayer dollars on inefficient, ineffective government. But the “monopolistic nature of government” — by itself — probably prevents such a thing from ever happening. Nor would we be happy if government actually operated like an American business, I suspect.
The research cited by Professor Baldwin in his paper, “Public Versus Private Employees: Debunking Stereotypes,” suggests that public employees — especially managers and administrators — tend to be “more political” than private industry employees. He defines the term “political” as an inclination toward “negotiating, compromising, and playing games to secure resources.”
We’re going to be talking here about playing games with public resources.
From the paper:
“The public sector not only attracts ‘political’ individuals but also purportedly demands political behavior as a result of the multiple interests to which public employees are accountable.”
Typically, an employee in private industry is beholden to a very select group: the company owner or shareholders. And typically, the measure of overall employee effectiveness is pretty straightforward: the company’s profit margin.
Public employees, on the other hand, are accountable to a somewhat broader range of stakeholders, beginning with the taxpayers and voters but also including management, elected officials, legislative bodies, the courts, regulatory agencies, special interest groups, the media, political parties, and the clientele served by their particular agency.
“In essence, the social pluralistic nature of our government… requires a political rationality, whereas the profit motives of the private sector require a professional rationality. In making decisions, public employees consequently aggregate many interests and consider the broad consequences of their behavior, while private employees typically pursue profit objectives with little consideration of external costs they might impose.”
With those thoughts in mind, we can join the audience at a meeting of the JSPFAG, yesterday at Town Hall. I have no idea what the acronym ‘JSPFAG’ stands for. For the past year, we’ve been referring to this five-member committee as “The Super Group” but maybe it now has an official government designation?
This committee was created to hear recommendations from three other, separate committees about potential local government funding for high-speed broadband (up to $100,000) and for affordable housing (up to $100,000) and for early childhood education (up to $200,000) to be allocated during 2018.
I’ve been involved in the Housing Advisory Group (HAC) which published a request for proposals (RFP) a few months ago, and subsequently picked two local organizations to each receive $50,000 out of the proposed $100,000 allocated for affordable housing programs.
One of the selected local agencies — the Archuleta County Housing Authority — asked for $50,000 to be used for studies related to a future LIHTC (Low Income Housing Tax Credit) project.
The other selected agency — the Pagosa Housing Partners (PHP) — had asked for $50,000 to create a ‘community-wide action plan’ that would include various types of housing other than LIHTC, and to uncover or develop funding streams to support those projects.
These two agencies had met several times and had agreed to focus on two very distinct approaches to affordable housing development. Prior to submitting their RFP responses, they’d also agreed to split the $100,000.
You might say, it was a rare instance of community cooperation to address a serious local problem.
In the midst of an ongoing housing crisis, evident to everyone in the community for at least the past three years, it took our local governments two years to dedicate even the modest amount of $100,000 to addressing the problem, and then took them over eight more months to actually pick two cooperating agencies to accept the (daunting?) assignment.
Politics. As slow as molasses and just as frustrating. But a single politician can make the process even more frustrating. Enter Commissioner Steve Wadley, at the JSPFAG meeting yesterday.
The purpose of the five-member JSPFAG (the “Super Group”) was to receive the recommendations from the HAC housing committee, the Early Childhood committee, and the Broadband committee, and analyze those recommendations… and then vote ‘Yea’ or ‘Nay.’
The ‘Yea’ or ‘Nay’ vote would then be sent on to the Board of County Commissioners and the Town Council, with a request for funding from each government.
Yesterday, the five members of the JSPFAG asked thoughtful questions of the recommended agencies, and received what generally seemed to be thoughtful answers. But the process became very uncomfortable (for most of us in the audience who have been following the ‘ups and downs’ of the housing crisis here in Archuleta County) thanks to Commissioner Steve Wadley. Throughout the meeting, the commissioner consistently attacked the Pagosa Housing Partner’s proposal and praised the proposal submitted by the Housing Authority.
He seemed to be playing a political game, aimed at undermining this rare attempt at community cooperation.
One quote from Commissioner Wadley, before we close Part Three:
“My concern with the [Pagosa Housing Partners] is… and I hate to be hateful, and I’m not trying to be hateful, and please don’t take this personally, but I did not want to spend this money on consultants. I wanted bricks and mortar, or spaces for early childhood, and megabytes for broadband… or kilobytes or whatever it is. And the PHP proposal totals $68,000 and they are only asking for $50,000 — but $56,000 of it is in consultant fees, and I just can’t support that.”
Commissioner Wadley is here misquoting the PHP proposal (which you can download here.) Only $24,000 is allocated for a highly qualified housing consultant, Willa Williford. The proposal includes two additional (local) employees who are not ‘consultants’ in any sense of the word… but Commissioner Wadley was playing a political game, and to that end, he was doing his best to exaggerate.
As Professor Baldwin noted in his research paper, a government employee has a wide range of stakeholders to consider when making any decision.
But there did seem to be one special stakeholder in the room last night, that Commissioner Steve Wadley was trying his very best to serve.
His good buddy, former commissioner Clifford Lucero.