Albuquerque Journal takes a shot at APS’ lack of accountability; misses the target.

APS has failed to adequately account for the spending of a couple of million tax dollars. As bad as that is, how do we know that it isn’t going to happen again this year? We don’t.

Assume for the sake of argument that the Peter Principle is valid; people get promoted for a job well done until they are finally promoted into a job that they can’t do. Realize that APS, according to an independent audit, evaluates administrators by a system that is “subjective and unrelated to promotion or step placement”. The combination seems to substantiate the supposition that inadequate accounting has to do with some administrator doing a job s/he can’t really do. Perhaps s/he didn’t to the job because they just didn’t feel like it. Maybe they didn’t even know it was their job.

The point is that nothing has happened that addresses the problem; there is no reason to believe that anything different will happen this year. That possibility is underscored by APS’ front man Rigo Chavez, who apparently thinks it was the city’s job to collect the data.

APS obviously doesn’t care about the job not being done. They have been dodging accountability forever. And because the Journal can’t be bothered to track down the responsible party or process, nothing has changed.

The whole idea behind accountability is to make sure that the same mistake is not made twice; or three times, or over and over again.

What the Journal Editors won’t report is that the leadership of the APS stands squarely against honest accountability to any meaningful standard of conduct for board members or administrators.

Bullseye.