Bureaucracy...Stop the Wasteful Concepts and Save a Fellow “Crat’s” Job

By “cleaning up their act” the bureaucracies can prevent the eventual layoffs and cutbacks which will reduce their ranks.


This column presents a conservative viewpoint about items of interest in our community and our lives. Focus is on items impacting your pocket book, your personal freedoms, and your rights. I hope you will read the column regularly and it occasionally influences your opinions and actions.


Bureaucratic leaders and Politicians…would you like to save a teacher’s job? Would you like to keep from being forced to lay-off road crews, reduce library operations, cut back on parks services, cut administrative staff, eliminate unessential social programs and services, and perform other unpleasant reduction actions dictated by budget shortfalls? If you do not want to be faced with these difficult duties, please take heed to the following paragraphs. They will provide other courses of action which you can take to help avert the need for these drastic actions which possibly will be in your future.

First, you must recognize the fact that the “Crat” is not immune from job eliminations and lay-offs. Although government employment is certainly much better protected from these actions than are jobs in industry and the private sector….they are not immune. If the money isn’t there and there are no other remedies….the cuts will occur.

How can the millions of dollars in funding be created which will be needed to avoid cuts in a time of severe budget shortfall, reduced revenues for state, county, and municipal operations? The answer is relatively simple…..merely stop engaging in wasteful, illogical money management practices relating to expenditures.

There are two openly endorsed procedures used within the bureaucracy which waste millions of taxpayer dollars in Florida each year, and billions across the USA. If these two practices could be exposed for being unnecessary, wasteful, (and dumb), and the public would loudly voice their disgust and despair when the practices are exposed, these monies could be saved. These wasted funds would then be available in the General Fund to make up the budget shortfalls and thus preserve the “crat” jobs.

Specifically I am revering to the “Bureaucratic Management Concept of Inept Money Management” which states “Once monies have been allocated for a purpose it is essential that ALL of that money be spent. Never, never, fail to spend all the money provided to you and return unused funds back to the funding source.”

In filling my role as a newspaper flunky, I am forced to continually attend official meetings of the County Commission, School Board, and numerous municipal commissions. I watch as they administer and spend the millions of tax dollars which have been reaped, raped, and coerced from the Citizens and Businesses of Jackson County, Florida, and the nation. Each year, at the local level, I observe millions being spent in what I see as a wasteful manner….just because of the concept described in the preceding paragraph.

When funding is allocated for a specific project, the officials are very careful to follow prescribed procedures to obtain bids from qualified vendors, to evaluate the bids and to formally select and approve the bid award. Then, when the project is over and they find they have saved thousands of dollars by these good management practices, they quickly look for some way to spend these “excess” dollars….never considering turning this funding back to the granting source. As a result, these monies are spent in a careless, wasteful manner on unnecessary things.

Recent examples would be the approval of creating a four lane entrance road to the Marianna Industrial Park with money not used on the road changes for the new Ice Springs plant. When thousands were unspent on the new Marianna water treatment plant, they spent the money on expanding the design to add back-up pumps and other features originally not deemed as necessary. A commonly uttered statement from one of these selfish officials is “If we don’t spend it we lose it”.

The other, equally wasteful practice is the “Zero Based Budgeting” concept which forces the managers of each bureaucratic element to be sure and spend all of the money in the budget each year. Again, they are told they should “Never, Never” fail to spend all of their money. This leads to computers, cars, and millions of dollars in perfectly good government equipment being scrapped and sold at auctions because new, replacement equipment has been bought in order to “spend” everything in the budget. We have all heard the stories of these wasteful practices. As a result, billions of taxpayer dollars are unnecessarily spent each year.

When I see the various government commissions working on their annual budgets, I am amazed at how it just happens that in almost every instance the department’s expenditures were exactly what had been budgeted. In reality, they found some way to throw any excess funds away on some unneeded items. There is no motivation to ever manage their departments so efficiently that a surplus would be present at the end of the year.

I would suggest a system where a manager earns “funding priority points” for future funding requests when they are able to return funds to the funding source. Those with the most funding priority points would be at the front of the line when the next round of funding takes place. This would reward them for their management skills and ability to save money within the system.

These improper, wasteful, (and dumb) practices are so ingrained in governmental fiscal policies, it seems to be impossible to convince those involved that they should do what is right, and return unneeded funding back into the system for future use… for the common good of the community, the state, and the nation. We need to be publically critical when our elected and appointed officials selfishly “keep and spend” public money just because it is in their grasp. This goes for sidewalks to nowhere, building new buildings when existing buildings are setting empty, reworking and landscaping road right of ways when it is not really necessary, and many, many other wasteful projects and programs. Just take time to notice the waste.

The old concept used as a measure of the ability of an elected official was their skills at “Bringing Home the Bacon, for the folks back home”. It is time to throw this short sighted, selfish concept aside and replace it with electing those with a nationally patriotic view which places the common national good ahead of local, party, or personal gains.

Perhaps if they can be made to realize that through the discontinuance of these wasteful (and dumb) practices they are not merely easing the tax burden on the public, they can also save the job of a fellow “crat”, because future budget shortfalls will be lessened, and more funds will be available at all levels. Perhaps then they will be motivated because of a desire to preserve the “bureaucratic brotherhood”, even if they won’t do it merely to lessen the burden on the poor taxpaying citizens.

In either instance, we as taxpayers should not tolerate continuation of these wasteful (and dumb) examples of mismanagement. We must stop allowing implied public permission through our silence when they take these actions.



Rudiments: Odds and Ends Worth Mentioning-

● Isn’t it interesting that there are over 600 federal “crats” in Washington that are failing to pay their federal income taxes…..and the IRS is hesitant to take action against them?

● Isn’t it interesting that the average wages and benefits for a federal employee totals $108,000/ Yr., while the average for a private sector worker is $69,000?

● Isn’t it interesting that the largest area of jobs creation and growth in our existing economy is government jobs?

- (Keeping my resolution to always say something nice), I award a big bouquet of flowers to the Marianna Probation and Parole and Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society of Chipola for sponsoring a fund raising fun run last weekend for the Special Olympics Program. Also flowers to those who participated.

● A bouquet of kudzu is awarded to Marianna Commissioners Howard Milton, Paul Donofro, and Roger Clay for voting to enforce the city’s ill conceived sign ordinance and force a local small business to waste $1400 on another sign for their building. We can see what causes those “anti-business attitude” remarks toward this Commission to be made.

● Downtown Marianna has just lost another business as Jema Boutique has announced the closing of their enterprise.



Note: The opinions stated in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Hatcher Publications.