Maybe most people don?t consider taking home a publicly-owned weed whacker a crime. And maybe lots of “public servants” do it. But stealing is stealing. The fact that Baltimore County employees routinely use maintenance equipment for personal use ? revealed in a recent county audit ? is wrong any way you look at the situation.
The excuse given by management at the Department of Recreation and Parks for permitting the behavior is particularly egregious: “… allowing employees to use County-owned equipment for personal use helps reduce equipment theft.”
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Since when is it a good policy to bribe people so that they don?t steal? And more importantly, who runs the department?
The audit also revealed that the Department did not properly use a more than $600,000 software system designed to help track equipment, work orders and facility maintenance, among other tasks. This means those who sneak equipment home can?t be caught and any attempts to measure productivity of staff and or hold the Department accountable for its work would be impossible.
It also shows the weakness of government measurement tools ? like Baltimore?s CitiStat and its Maryland-wide version, StateStat. Both programs, designed to track things including overtime, response times to fixing potholes and project costs ? can be excellent tools for holding government accountable to the people. But they won?t work unless the data used to analyze performance is accurate. That takes leadership, which by definition includes demanding the highest ethical conduct of all employees, and proper action, repeatedly. Otherwise more problems like the one in the Baltimore County Recreation and Police Department and the police department, where two automatic weapons could not immediately be found in a recent review, will repeat themselves.
To restore trust, Recreation and Parks Director Robert Barrett must fire known offenders. Then he must overhaul the records in his care so that all equipment is accounted for and apply stiff penalties to any employees caught bringing equipment home and who purposely circumvent using Mainstar, the maintenance management software. Well-run and beautiful facilities may be one measure of performance as Barrett told The Examiner last week. But proving the department is a good steward of taxpayer resources is more important.
