Herban Sprawl

This one’s for all you venerable Star City municipal employees, and  especially my favorite one  - bless your hearts!

I was noting the lack of sunshine in part of my back yard when I realized the cause was not my wonderful corkscrew willow, Fred, nor my spruce, Nick. (Yes, yes, we named our trees -) Rather it was the weed trees that had sprouted on the city’s 12 x 60 feet right-of-way at the back, along Mount Vernon Avenue.

Technically, we are responsible for maintaining city rights-of-way, and I would willingly do so if it only meant mowing a gangway between sidewalk and a street. However, in this case we are discussing a steep embankment and I did more than my fair share in the first 15 years we resided at this address. Since giving up on it as a lost cause, costing me hundreds of dollars every season, I have annually called the weed control number and told them to send the man with the tractor, and they have, but it has never been enough. You can tell by the circumference of the weed trees that the method has been lacking.

So I mentioned to BGF that I probably needed to call my friendly neighborhood city employee, the guy who found this house for us, and see if he could pull some strings to get a crew out here to deal with the detritus. “He’s in the countdown,” was the reply. I know what that means.

In the city school system, some odd fifteen years ago, we kept telling city council and school board members that we had a crisis that was going to cave in on them like the Cherry Mine Disaster. We kept telling them that teacher morale was so bad that the best teachers among the young ones were leaving for the county and Independent Republic of Salem, where they made more money and lived with less bull****. We kept telling them that the best of the veteran staff were counting down the days until early retirement, and they would lose the mentors and the strength of the system. We told them it was due to the poor treatment at the hands of school administrators who didn’t value what they had.

Well, we were right. It came to pass. And the new school superintendent has had to ramp up recruiting to levels never before seen in the Star City. She’s also hired back retirees!

The railroad, once the heart and soul of this area, is famous for using up its employees. To be sure, they don’t have to pay out huge pension plans because what happens is that ten days into the job, employees start the countdown until retirement. They retire on schedule and then they die of exhaustion and the railroad only has to pay out widows’ benefits!  Or the railroad puts them on medical disability, just short of full retirement, thus denying retirement benefits.

Well, now the Star City’s municipal employees are “enjoying” the same treatment as the teachers and the railroad workers have had. Only theirs is at the hands of Madame Umbrage, the city manager. I wish I could claim authorship of that moniker, but the city employees are huge Harry Potter fans…

I am willing to give Ms. Burcham her props on the good things she has engineered for the city, such as cleaning up the brownfield that was visible from I 581. And I appreciate her work on behalf of our skyline. I especially appreciate the fact that she informed city employees, who are paid by the taxpayers, that they are not to do the research work for a certain independent economic development company while on city time. She’s made a lot of good things happen for us. She showed us what happens when a little forward vision is applied to the same old same old.

But the fact remains, city hall has become a toxic workplace. A few years ago, a city employee ran for council. She got on the ballot, but she didn’t win. No surprises, there. Everybody knew why she was running. Periodically, there have been flare-ups and people with power have been toppled by Madame Umbrage’s own, more powerful, underground. It’s all been kept out of the papers, and no one will talk about it publicly. Clearly, we have an elephant in the living room.

My particular complaint has to do with the fact that the city council, like the school board, has been the tail wagged by the dog. It isn’t like council doesn’t know the woman has been a holy terror. It isn’t like they don’t know she’s called Madame Umbrage – some of them probably have used the terms themselves – but the fact that they still do not take control of the situation rankles my taxpayin’ little self.

When they can’t fill city government positions because nobody is nuts or desperate enough to go to work down there, then maybe, like the school board, they’ll wake up. Meanwhile, the talent drain will continue. Experienced staffers who are excellent at their jobs are tired of the BS and are, like the teachers, voting with their feet or counting down until early retirement.

My solution is simple. There is no need to fire Darlene Burcham. She’s a good city manager, even though I don’t like the way she handles personnel. Instead, council needs to redefine her job and set her evaluation goals up in such a way that she gets the message that they are the ones who assign her tasks, not the other way around. Then the spineless wimps need to stick to process and show her who’s boss. Right now she is very clearly and distinctly in the driver’s seat and city hall is working neither well nor efficiently, but rather in a state of anxiety, just like an alcoholic family waiting for the drunk parent to come home and raise hell all over the place. Council needs to address that by means of procedures and evaluations. If it doesn’t get cleaned up after that, well, she can always go to work for Mayor Daley. He’ll show her who’s Boss.