When Timothy Firestine, Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett’s top administrative officer, was asked by a Washington Post reporter whether the county had a major problem with unmonitored take-home vehicles, he replied: “I don’t even know yet. When I ask questions and I’m sort of not getting answers, my antennae go up. We really need to work on strengthening the controls and oversight.” Well, our antennae go up when public officials admit they have no clue about how county residents’ tax dollars are being spent. In fact, if Montgomery is serious about accountability, it should start with Firestine — the highest-paid bureaucrat in Montgomery County. As The Washington Examiner’s Brian Hughes reported, Firestine makes more than $266,000 per year, yet he is somehow entitled to the free use of a $38,116 Chevy Tahoe paid for by county taxpayers.
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Thanks to the dogged work done by County Council Member Hans Riemer, D-at large, Montgomery taxpayers now know that they spent $6.76 million to purchase a fleet of 349 vehicles for top- and middle-level bureaucratic desk jockeys to use for private, off-duty trips. Some bureaucrats have even been caught driving county-owned vehicles out of the county, a violation of their own policy. Yet nobody has been fired.
Firestine maintains that the county merely needs to “work” on keeping better track of the fleet. How about just taking the keys away and telling county employees to start driving their own cars for a change? If necessary, the county can reimburse them for any work-related mileage. This overblown sense of entitlement isn’t limited to taxpayer-funded vehicles. It was also clearly on display last year when The Examiner broke the story about similar abuses in the employee tuition assistance program, which has since been shut down. More recently, Montgomery police officers have been paid an estimated $10 million in overtime despite the lack of required documentation.
Any private business that doesn’t keep track of employee vehicle use and overtime quickly goes out of business. With no such fears, Montgomery County bureaucrats have become ever bolder in bending the rules for their own benefit. Just the two examples cited here involve unaccountable expenditures of more than $16 million, money that comes directly from the pockets of families and business.
