Whose head(s) should roll in an oversight failure?

Recently in the news; numerous reports of city employees spending their days serving their own interests instead of the people's.

You know that a handful of reports is the only the tip of an enormous iceberg.

As citizens and taxpayers, our defense against public corruption and incompetence is administrative oversight. With the exception of an occasional whistleblower and investigative reporter, it is our only defense.

Every public servant bent on betraying the public trust, expects to get away with it. They know the system, and they expect that their corruption and/or incompetence will not be exposed. They know they are breaking the law, and do it anyway because they believe they can get away with it.

It is possible to create institutions where it is impossibly difficult to hide corruption or incompetence; casinos and banks to name two. Government could be a third. Government, the spending of the public trust and treasure, could be so transparent as to make it nearly impossibly difficult to hide public corruption and incompetence.

Instead, we have city employees disappearing from their jobs for years at a time, and know idea who their immediate supervisor is, or theirs.

We do know where the buck stops.

Albuquerque voters elected Mayor Richard Berry to provide oversight over the spending of our power and resources. The responsibility rests on his shoulders; the buck stops on his desk.







Berry delegated authority, but not his responsibility, to Chief Administrative Officer Rob Perry who passed down as well, and so it went until at some point, public servants were able to defraud taxpayers for years on end, with no one noticing.

Whose head will roll? Whose head should?

Clearly, the heads of politicians and public servants careless enough to get caught in flagrante delicto should roll. What about their immediate supervisor? And theirs?

Berry's head will not roll over this failure of oversight. Nor will Perry's, nor will Perry's immediate subordinate nor theirs. No heads will roll except the poor slobs who get caught.

And that's how you enable public corruption and incompetence.




photos Mark Bralley