River News: Our View

We have been watching the ongoing talk about reorganizing Oneida County government for a while now and with some skepticism, not least because Oneida County officials tend to talk a lot and virtually never change what they are doing.

They do, however, spend a lot of money doing nothing.

In their most recent exercise in spinning their wheels, county board chairman Scott Holewinski got the county board to spring for an assessment of the county’s day-to-day operations and to come up with ways the county might reorganize and be more efficient.

Now we don’t have a problem with that at all. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Oneida County is a mess. They never cut programs. They short the Lakeland area in countless ways, though they are ever eager to take our tax dollars. With a few notable exceptions, the bureaucracy is notoriously insular and opposed to transparency. 

The bureaucracy, too, is hostile to the private sector, except when it comes to special interests. And on and on.

It’s a little less a mess since Holewinski became chairman — at least they have stopped spending out of nonrecurring balances to pay for ongoing expenses — and Holewinski deserves high marks for trying to accomplish what he has pursued for years as a supervisor: Impose some accountability on the county’s powerful yet often inept bureaucracy and, hopefully, in the process cut spending.

But he’s been swimming in shark-infested waters, and this past week the predators of the county’s deep state were circling their lunch ever closer.

After the reorganization consultants issued their report, the minions got to work with two possibilities. Either hire a full-time coordinator who would oversee day-to-day operations or continue with the present model, which marries the human resources director’s job with an in-name-only county coordinator’s role, and tweak it to make it better.

Holewinski favors restructuring and hiring a coordinator, while supervisor Billy Fried wants to stay with the status quo, only he would try to overcome the model’s current weaknesses by writing a specific job description that would establish expectations and measurable outcomes. Fried would also have the county re-evaluate how everything is working after a short while.

We are not taking a position one way or the other. Frankly, there are arguments on both sides.

For starters, hiring a full-time coordinator comes with inherent risks. For one thing it costs money and a lot of it, maybe $200,000 a year. For another, a coordinator is another bureaucrat who can build a fiefdom in the kingdom, one more troll placing obstacles in front of elected supervisors.

You don’t hire criminals to police criminals, and you shouldn’t hire bureaucrats to police other bureaucrats, so the saying goes, lest they join forces to carry out the mother of all heists.

And Fried’s idea of trying out a tweaked status quo with the promise of a relatively quick evaluation makes sense, too. After all, why spend big bucks unless you absolutely have to, and what’s the rush? Oneida County has been dysfunctional for years, what’s six more months?

Still, there’s an argument for Holewinski’s position, too. The biggest is, there is no one running the overall show and no one for the county board to hold accountable. There is a leadership vacuum, in other words.

In their report, the consultants acknowledged the vacuum created by the lack of a day-to-day manager, saying that “in that vacuum the elected county board chairman retains the most power and comes closest to an executive in charge.”

True, but it’s unrealistic to think that any county board chairman can come close to adequately managing the day-to-day affairs of a massive organization. The job of the chairperson is to lead on vision, policy, and legislation, not daily management.

Indeed, imagine a large construction company whose board of directors decides they don’t need a foreman or forewoman at their construction sites. Just send the teams in and let them build. There would be no one person to apprise the board of the project’s status, whether it’s on schedule and within costs. There would be no one person to ensure that the site is code compliant and safe. There would be no one person in charge to make sure each vital phase of the project is in sync or even of required quality.

The same with the county. Right now there is no one person to apprise the county board on the implementation of its overall mission, no one person to hold accountable when those policies are not implemented. There’s no one person overseeing long-range capital improvement plans and fiscal forecasts. There’s no one person to address countywide problems when they suddenly arise, as opposed to agency-specific issues that department heads can handle.

We simply can’t imagine a private sector company operating without a CEO in charge, but that is what the county is doing. Holewinski may be the chairman of the board but there’s no chief executive.

The other problem with the lack of a central authority is that department heads build up power in their own little spheres of control. They have committees of jurisdiction, but that’s just five members who usually want to protect their own little turf squares of power and so form alliances with the bureaucrats. The government becomes a war zone of skirmishes and backstabbing, and that’s at its best.

Then there’s the problem of inherently powerful county positions, such as a corporation counsel or human resources director, who accrue even more power in a diffuse system. Remember, the consultants acknowledged that a vacuum exists without a coordinator or administrator, and, as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum, and those vacuums are usually filled by something or someone.

In county government, that means that one or two unelected bureaucrats will step in to fill the void, appropriating authority well beyond their jurisdictional boundaries. Corporation counsel Mike Fugle’s pathetic and irresponsible attempt to essentially act as the county’s de facto zoning director this past year is a classic example.

The result of all this is some 20-plus agencies with their own little power centers and their own cheerleaders in their committees of jurisdiction, each trying to manipulate the entire county board, which must take it all in without any filter or clarifying counter information.

Usually, the bureaucracies and the bureaucrats end up doing what they want. As is often the case in modern America, the bureaucratic tail ends up wagging the elected dog.

As we mentioned, a coordinator position might itself end up being a bureaucratic thorn in the side — it did before — but dealing with one big thorn is maybe better than dealing with more than 20 smaller but still lethal thorns.

Add to that the perception coming from this past week’s administration committee, with the long enthroned Lisa Charbarneau essentially arguing that, really, everything is OK if you just don’t look too close, and, if you close your eyes and like what you see, then give me even more power to consolidate on the bureaucracy’s behalf.

Well, we don’t like what we see. Charbarneau is the poster child of the administrative state. She has fought and won so many power struggles it is hard to count them, and the only thing shocking is that most supervisors fail to see the negative role she has played after all these years.

Over the decades, to cite just one example, Charbarneau has been a big believer in the great wage scam known as “keeping competitive with wages in comparable counties.” Here’s how it has worked: County A hires a consultant, who surveys surrounding counties and who then tells County A that counties B and C have recently raised their wages and County A needs to as well to stay competitive. 

And of course County A, with the nudging of a friendly insider bureaucrat, raises its wages. Then that consultant heads to a neighboring county, telling them County A just raised their wages and they need to do so to stay competitive. And that county does so. And then they head to another neighboring county, telling them their neighbors have raised their wages and they need to do so immediately, and on and forever until they circle back around to counties A, B, and C with the same message: Hey, you have to raise wages!

All the while — and here is the betrayal that exposes the scam — the government bureaucrats get paid increasingly more than their local counterparts in the private sector.

This week Charbarneau was up to her bureaucratic tricks again, telling committee members that it would cost as much to hire an administrator with far more power and requiring far more experience and professional credentials as it would to hire a coordinator, which is emphatically not true and which Holewinski correctly pointed out.

The point is, Charbarneau can’t be trusted, and that might be the biggest reason to look elsewhere for a coordinator.

Even so, we are not saying that retaining the current model isn’t the way to go. We trust Fried’s sensibility and motives, and believe he is reasonably proposing a do-over for a period of time to see if it can work. We don’t believe it will, but it is the least expensive option and what can it hurt?

We are less sanguine about Charbarneau’s motives — she’s the bureaucrat with the most to gain and has demonstrated a unique ability to accrue bureaucratic power over the years — and Cushing, as much as we like him, has the DNA of the elitist and establishment Wisconsin Counties Association running in his veins.

Their solution, as reasonable as it may sound, sounds suspiciously like a bureaucratic attempt to batten down the hatches. Maybe not. But as these discussions proceed, citizens need to be vigilant because this is an organization that spends millions of our tax dollars. 

In considering any proposal, cost is paramount, of course. But as always, the central thing to keep the eyes on is the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy always works to undermine democracy and consolidate and enhance its own power. Consider this model, perhaps, but beware the bureaucracy.

Always beware the bureaucracy.