Tales from the Budcomm - they don't want to do their jobs? - Granite Grok

Tales from the Budcomm – they don’t want to do their jobs?

BudgetI’m a bit late on commenting on this – the last meeting was on May 24th.  While the entire 2 hour video can be seen here (and if you are concerned with openness and transparency, there’s quite a dollop of it, care of moi), I’ve clipped out the part that had my eyebrows up over my head (it starts up around 40 minutes for a better context).

The heart of what a good Budget Committee does (and is mandated to do) is to go over the budget at the General Ledger line item level (GL Account, or “line item” as it is often referred to). But rookie BudComm member Joe Wernig (a hard Progressive who ran on a platform that NOTHING should be cut from government, especially the School District budget) actually said that he isn’t going to do what he was elected to do; “I don’t want to do that!” (at 2:16, below):

What was worse was the Chair, Sean Murphy stating the same thing that analyzing the GL accounts presented in the Town and School Board budgets shouldn’t be done ( “that should be their job not ours”). I could be persuaded that Wernig just doesn’t know any better it being only his second meeting. However, for Sean Murphy, who is the Chair and has been on the BudComm for a number of years so he knows what the BudComm’s mandate is,  to out loud make it clear that “It’s not our job!” to investigate and analyze the GLs, then what is it?

If that’s your attitude, then there’s nothing for the BudComm to do, is there? Other than waste a whole lot of everyone’s time working on a farce?  The root cause question, however, is why then did you run to be on the BudComm?

From my viewpoint, it’s not to do the work, there’s only one conclusion that one can make – to make sure the work isn’t done.

I’ll have more to say on “micromanagement” later.

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