Black is white and white is black in SLO, city employees say

HumanReason, I’ve worked in similar circumstances, and I wish you and the other good workers weren’t being subjected to this caustic and ineffective work environment. It sounds like SLO City is in the grips of uncontrolled cronyism, and that is a very difficult thing to change because it becomes entrenched at the upper management, administrative and legislative levels. I hope the good workers of SLO City can find a way to keep their integrity AND effectively start to effect positive change in a cronyfied workplace.

Unfortunately, it is the same situation in many of the local area government agencies in our county.

Another local CSD has gone through a succession of poorly qualified, inept and allegedly corrupt GMs. The latest GM to warm the GM’s chair seems to be mystified by the Brown Act and many other basic education and skills necessary to even start to approach an assistant-manager position. The situation is teetering near the tipping point now as it seems the accounting and other records have been so mismanaged and/or destroyed, and the computer systems so screwed up, that the several years of required annual independent certified audits may never be able to be performed.

Paso Robles is a prime example of how a city can be degraded by inept leadership, management and administration. When the Baby-Hughie-esque City Manager convinces the motleyed city council members and mayor to give a $350,000 pay-off in hush money to a departing chief of police who has been accused by many of her subordinates of sexual assaults and other criminal acts—you know the inmates are running the asylum.

One CSD’s GM resigned several years ago because, according to several newspaper quotes of the GM, the job had become too big for him, and he had no experience in management. A few years later, the economy goes downward, consulting jobs become scarce, and he became magically completely capable of doing the job of GM, even though it had become far more complicated than it was when he previously resigned. He had done nothing to increase his skills in the interim, to the point that he did not even know what he needed to know, and much had changed in the water and sewer services world since his previous contract with the CSD.

Then there is the SSLOCSD John-Wallace-led collapse of the ability of the wastewater plant to do its job, allowing millions of gallons of raw sewage to be discharged into the ocean, and homes in Oceano to be flooded with raw sewage coming out of sewer access points in streets, as well as coming up through their toilets–it is quite evident that the SSLOCSD has become one fetid morass of self-serving corruption. This WW plant has been embroiled in many other Wallace-connected scandals, as well. The failure of the WW plant will probably cost the agency $$$million in fines before it is all over.

All of these local government agency failures results in increased funding spent on fines, fixing unnecessary mistakes on basic issues in policies, paying for wasted staff time trying to deal with an inept and unqualified GM’s junior-league mistakes, and the endless studies that were so poorly thought out before they were contracted out that, by the time the study is complete, the information it contains is near meaningless.

If small-potatoes CSDs can cause so much damage and wasted resources by inept management, I cringe to think of the harm that can be done by inept management on the level of SLO City. I wish the SLOCity staff the best in dealing with this.