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9 Thursday, January 5, 2012
The Calvert Gazette
c
ommissioners
Happy New Year!
By Susan Shaw
Calvert County Commissioner,
2nd District
c
orner
The Board of County Commissioners
(BOCC) is elected for a four
year term and elects officers every year
on the third Tuesday in December. On
December 20, the BOCC held the second
election in this term and elected
Commissioner Gerald “Jerry” Clark as
the President and Commissioner Steven
“Steve” Weems as the Vice President. I
offer my congratulations to them!
Does this action mean that I have
somehow been “dissed” by my fellow
Commissioners? NO. This action is
not about me nor about the job I have
done in the role of BOCC President, as was stressed at the time of
the election. Rather, the other four Commissioners were all quite
complimentary about my tenure as President. This action is a
reflection of the desire to experience a different leadership style
and to allow others the opportunity to lead.
Commissioner Clark, like myself, has served as a Commissioner
for nine long years. He sought the opportunity to demonstrate
his form of leadership. Nine years is a long time to wait.
We all sincerely believe we are acting in the best interests of Calvert
County. Additionally, my style of leadership is not for everyone
and is not a prerequisite for doing a competent job. One of
the parts of the Commissioner role that I most enjoy is being out
in the community, recognizing citizens for all their good works,
supporting community efforts of all kinds, and gathering information
about what County government is doing right and where
we can improve. While enjoyable for me, it is also exhausting
and time-consuming in addition to all the other crucial duties of a
Commissioner like budgeting, administrative duties, reading volumes
of background information, answering 200 to 300 emails
per day, and interacting with the media. Yes, many less people
call now, but many more email. While numerous emails can
be dealt with fairly quickly, others require weeks and months of
follow-up. Because my children are adults and I am not currently
running a business, and because I am a very energetic, outgoing
person, I could make a time and energy commitment that most
people cannot. Please keep in mind that the County Commissioner
role is paid for part-time work.
Commissioner Clark will demonstrate his own competent
leadership style which is different from mine, and which may
provide a more realistic model for the other current Commissioners and for future officeholders.
Commissioner Nutter stated that he does not feel ready quite yet to take the helm
of the BOCC, but that he felt that experiencing a different way of doing the President’s
role would help in his preparation and Commissioner Weems seconded that notion. I
agree. Commissioner Slaughenhoupt voted in solidarity.
I must tell you that it took me a little while to understand that the other Commissioners
were not repudiating my work over the last year and that the decision was really
not about me.
Commissioner Clark brings important strengths to the Presidency of the BOCC.
Like me, he has gained a lot of experience and knowledge over these last nine years. He
has led the Tri-County Council, composed of all the elected people in the three Southern
MD Counties, over the last two years, and has tightened and heightened the management
of that entity. As a business owner, who has to make a payroll and a profit on a regular basis
to stay in business, he is good at decisive decision-making. He is very strong fiscally,
with an in-depth knowledge of real estate contracts and finance. These skills are crucial
as we move into a period where we will have significantly less property tax revenue to
distribute among all our priorities as a County government. He likes to negotiate and I
teasingly call him a wheeler-dealer in admiration of those skills that will be put to good
use over the coming year. We share a practicality and pragmatism in our views. He has
a healthy skepticism about the motives for requests that will serve the citizens well. Most
importantly, Commissioner Clark cares deeply about Calvert County.
Consequently, I extend my most sincere congratulations to both Commissioner
Clark and to Commissioner Weems in their new roles as BOCC President and Vice President
for the coming year! Calvert County is truly blessed with the elected leadership of
all five Commissioners. I am proud to serve with each of them. Each brings a unique
background and perspective that makes our total commitment a formidable force. I will
continue to play an integral role and will continue to represent you to the best of my ability.
Thank you for your generous and on-going support.
Guest Editorial
Toothless Audits
By Marta Hummel Mossburg
One of the most egregious outrages of the financial collapse
is that none of those responsible for it on Wall Street has
been held accountable in a court of law.
A whole movement -- Occupy Wall Street -- grew out of
the fact that crony capitalism allows a tiny few to reap vast
financial rewards at the expense of the rest of the country.
If only some of that anger would be turned on state government’s
repeated abuses.
For years, the Office of Legislative Audits (OLA) has been
churning out reports about malfeasance and misfeasance, laziness,
waste and general bad management within Maryland
state agencies. Often the office’s reports find the same flagged
behavior unchanged in multiple follow-up reports.
One recent report details how Maryland State Highway
Administration officials disguised overspending; conspired
with vendors to hide money in order to bilk taxpayers out of
more; and shuffled money around within the agency inappropriately.
In 2004 the OLA found that the same agency violated
procurement rules by giving (without a competitive bidding
process) a $750,000 contract to a company where a high-ranking
employee’s wife worked.
An audit of the Department of the Environment released
earlier this month showed the agency circumvented procurement
rules to give contracts to favored people and performed
only a fraction of required site inspections. In the past few
years, auditors have found state employees who used state
computers to access porn thousands of times per week; thousands
charged to state credit cards for personal items including
televisions, clothes and video games; and identified millions
in missing funds.
The people of Maryland have no reason to believe anything
is done about those reports. Legislators express outrage,
but do not require agency heads to remedy the situation within
a specific time or lose privileges, dollars -- or their jobs.
And so OLA soldiers on with its work, relegated to being
the CEO of trees falling in a forest that no one knows exists.
This is not to say its work is not important. On the contrary,
it’s essential to holding government accountable.
But agency employees should not be forced to spend time
reporting about behavior that will not be corrected.
Some have speculated the state needs to budget more
money for internal auditors within agencies. But there is no
reason to believe those people will have more of a chance of
changing a corrupt culture than whistle-blower Eugene Simmers,
a longtime SHA employee who was forced to leave after
he outed contractors filing false time sheets and overbilling
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LETTERS
the agency. He is vindicated now, but he paid a steep financial
price for speaking out. Institutions protect themselves above
all else. Look no farther than the Jerry Sandusky child rape
scandal at Penn State for evidence.
Bad audits need to come with real financial consequences
for agencies in terms of withheld operating funds. Agency
heads should also be held criminally liable when their institutions
repeatedly defraud taxpayers. Without those changes,
OLA will remain political theater for those who hold power.
Marta Hummel Mossburg is a senior fellow at the Maryland
Public Policy Institute.
from heaven to take the form of a baby, later to grow into
the man of Jesus. Whether you believe that Jesus was both
fully man and fully God is up to you. But that is what Christians
profess. One international ministry which teaches about
Jesus uses the illustration of two cliffs separated by a bottomless
pit – man is on one cliff and God is on the other. “How
can man get across to God?” The ministry draws a bridge that
takes the form of a cross, the place upon which Jesus died for
proclaiming his message.
Jesus’ message was about changing hearts. One at a
time. He said. “There is no greater love than this that a man
lay down his life for another.” He had two meanings in mind
when he said this. First he foretold of his dying for his people.
But he also meant people laying down their lives daily for others.
Imagine if everyone laid down time spent watching TV,
reading the Internet Social Networks, working extra hours to
get ahead … and invested that hour or so a week in developing
relationships with at risk youth, teaching a job skills class
in prison or mentoring an inmate who just got out of prison.
The nation was originally founded by men and women
who believed in the message of Jesus, the reason for Christmas.
As the nation moves further away from the lessons
taught, the prisons fill up. Coincidence? While the Gazette
doesn’t have space to provide all the prisoner’s responses to
questions asked, it was interesting to note that the majority
wrote about getting back to teaching church, morals, respect,
spirituality, and sanctity of life as solutions for keeping the
prison population down.
The message of the Christmas season boils down to this:
When God considered the struggles of humanity he did not
just resource a project to help out. He laid aside the comforts
of heaven and came down to earth. Jesus lived among his people,
personally touching them at their point of greatest need.
In addition to the resources of governments and charities, society
needs more people like Chaplin John Graham and Merle
Morrow who followed Jesus’ example willingly laying aside
their comforts to touch those in need. Not just as an act of
holiday kindness, but throughout the year.
Calvert Gazette
P. O. Box 250 . Hollywood, MD 20636
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