In response to HumidHaney's post.
It's when I have to set foot in City Hall that I begin to think that I am in fact a horrible racist. I can get along fine with the folks on the street, and I hate the street corner thugs for their actions, not their skin tone. When dealing with people in business, I have no problems, but these are people who are generally competent in their field. When you set foot in City Hall, you are dealing with people who do not have a resume to freshen up. They are in, and our broken Civil Service system has no ability to remove them. These are people who are not only entitled to special privileges rendered by their friends across the hall, they are entitled to keep their job no matter how incompetently their work is performed. It's unfortunate, but the people that you generally get "face time" with in City Hall are the bitter losers who are sitting at the same front desk for 25 years because they are far too incompetent to be promoted, but because of our failing Civil Service system, they can not be relieved of duty, so they sit and spread their invective.
I don't mean to slander every city hall employee, the staff in Stacy Head's office are excellent and set a standard to be met. I met not long ago with Mr. Nguyen, the City Engineer, and he is polite, competent and efficient, but we all know that he is an exception down there.
It is unfortunate that these hangars on create a environment where anyone who has a work ethic and a level of competence becomes jaded and despondent about their work or quits and finds a "real" job. C Ray and Dr. Blakely are case in point. They entered the job with the best of intentions, but now have realized that their best efforts will be mired in incompetence and corruption to the point that they quit trying. This inertia is killing our recovery.
Something must be done about the Civil Service system. I don't know if this requires a change in the City Charter, but I'm sure some other people from the real world who have work ethic can help to figure it out.
This slothocracy must be replaced by a system that rewards competence and most importantly it must punish incompetence with the possibility of termination. That threat has no teeth right now.
