Reconciliation: 16

Nothing costs local governments more than hiring human resource directors who have neither the experience nor the education for the job. Most often, after three federal lawsuits, all lost or settled at significant expense to the city, the director sometimes “grows into the job.” The cost, meanwhile, may come close to the cost of hiring someone and sending them to college ere giving them responsibility in the first place.

The chief culprit is almost always the same: not understanding the simple necessity of documentation. An employee gets drunk and exposes himself while on city business. Another sends a city crew to pave her church’s parking lot. A truly crafty one fakes a disability and is later caught water skiing.

Or so someone says.

The miscreant is fired. The Firing is overturned by the court. Why? It is because the first question even the most incompetent defendant’s attorney will ask is, “may we see the documentation?” Sadly, a frequent answer is, “Well, we didn’t see the need to document all the times it happened. That would have taken a lot of time away from city business and, anyway, everybody knew it was going on and they’ll testify to that fact.” (Background sound: “Cha ching, cha ching”).

Documentation. A Master’s Degree in Public Administration will teach a myriad of useful things, none more important than “if ain’t written down, it didn’t happen.”

Administrators at the local level often learn this, not in college but at the “school of hard knocks.” Local government is not the highest level of government but an extremely important one. As they say, it is where “the rubber meets the road.” It is good when we learn lessons while there is still time to ward off total destruction. Kudos to our cities and the great people who work in local government and learn painful lessons early on before the storm clouds descend.

One would think, hope—pray perhaps—that those folks at the highest level of government would understand, beforehand, the simple necessity and practice of documentation. If they don’t employ the practice themselves, at least they understand that seasoned administrators do. They anticipate documentation and act accordingly.

Apparently, some do and some don’t. Those that do will win. Those that don’t will whine that they aren’t being treated fairly. This is a sad spectacle to watch on national TV.

As a mentor of mine remarked recently, “We need to start electing better people to public office.” That isn’t a partisan fact. It is an American fact, and a simple one at that.