As you may have seen in some comments on this site and as The Daily Dispatch fully reports today, the majority of the Vance County Board of Commissioners will be taking a long weekend in Hawaii starting Friday.
Maybe it’s our professional cynicism, but we have a hard time getting too worked up about the trip of Danny Wright, Eddie Wright, Terry Garrison and Tommy Hester to Oahu for the annual National Association of Counties conference.
It’s not that we think it’s worth spending $7,868.83 in taxpayer money to send the four men to a tropical paradise for a few days. It’s a boondoggle, plain and simple.
We didn’t pursue the news story in part because we knew what the commissioners would say:
* It’s a business trip.
* It’s hard work.
* It’s a great value for the taxpayers because we learn how to do our jobs better, or we get to make valuable contacts, or we learn clever techniques to make Vance County run better.
It’s the same story whenever anyone questions expensive trips to exotic locations for public officials. The officials try to make it sound as if they’re making a great sacrifice to go to Hawaii, and they tell us that any outraged taxpayers just don’t understand these conferences. You’d think there was a county commissioner playbook on how to answer media questions about their working vacations. (In fact, one of the workshops in Hawaii is titled “Courage Under Fire — Staying Cool When the Media Turns Up the Heat.”)
We do understand these conferences. If you doubt that this weekend is as much about pleasure as about business, ask yourself this: Why is the event in Hawaii?
If NACo’s national gathering were all about improving county governments, wouldn’t a less expensive place with far fewer distractions be a better choice? (In fact, a small town with plenty of hotels, fast-food restaurants and ABC permits, plus good airport access, would be ideal. When do we put our bid in?)
This conference is in Hawaii to maximize attendance, and having it in Hawaii maximizes attendance because county commissioners love to have the excuse to go on vacation in Hawaii. It’s as simple as it seems.
As for the value of attendance, here’s a brochure on the workshops being offered. Several of them cover topics of great interest around here, such as neighborhood revitalization, rural transportation planning, the promotion of strong families and the use of problem properties.
But the wrong people are attending the workshops. The county commissioners don’t administer the Vance government or propose dramatic changes or exciting initiatives. That work is done by County Manager Jerry Ayscue and his staff, while the commissioners are left to judge the staff actions and make some suggestions for Ayscue to try or at least consider. And if getting the ideas and information to the county staff secondhand is worthwhile, couldn’t the national association just send every county a few DVDs of the presentations and save us all some money?
Meanwhile, who chose the daily keynote speakers? Aside from entertainment, we don’t see Vance County gaining much when the commissioners report back on the collected wisdom of a newspaper reporter you’ve never heard of (the overrated T.R. Reid of The Washington Post), an independent filmmaker you’ve never heard of (Matt Farnsworth, who has done a couple of films about the meth epidemic) and a TV judge (Glenda Hatchett). Hmm, seems like the perfect lineup if you’re considering skipping the group meal and taking the wife out on the town.
It’s possible the commission quartet will return to Vance with all the answers to our problems. Even one answer would be worth more than $7,900, particularly if you figure that 100 ETC jobs, to take a current example, are worth $56,715, or $11,343 per year.
The relatively low cost for this trip — less than $2,000 per man — is the main reason we can’t get too upset. Yes, the commissioners are taking advantage of their positions in public service to squeeze out a fringe benefit that most of the county government’s employees can’t afford, let alone Vance’s countless fast-food workers and unemployed. That fact makes us jealous and angry.
But in a county with a budget of about $45 million, an additional $7,900 in the bank wouldn’t go very far. We couldn’t hire another sheriff’s deputy or give the deputies a meaningful raise. It wouldn’t speed countywide zoning or make a meaningful start on a county water system.
And let’s be thankful the amount isn’t higher. According to the Dispatch, the commissioners are paying for their own food in Hawaii. Apparently, the county has learned from the embarrassment the city felt in 2001 over its food and wine bills from officials’ conference trips.
Maybe this is a place for the Henderson-Vance Economic Partnership and its corporate sponsors and grant writer to intervene. The commissioners’ work at this conference certainly has an economic development aspect to it. Let’s follow Commissioner Deborah Brown’s suggestion from Monday night and hand the decision on whether to fund such trips to the partnership. If the partnership’s members, who are mostly business people, think the cost-benefit analysis justifies sending four people to these conferences each year, the partnership can pay for the trip.
You’ll notice that three of the four commissioners going to Hawaii are the Board of Commissioners’ official representatives on the partnership board, and the fourth happens to be the man whose support moved the partnership endorsement out of committee and ensured its passage before the full board. After all that, maybe they deserve a vacation.