Interim City Administrator Takiyah Douse’s much ballyhooed “rightsizing plan” has had almost six months to go into effect, but instead it is becoming the main piece of evidence proving the interim administrator is in over her head.
The term “rightsizing” is now becoming equated with simply the rebranding of the status quo and the steady growth of a bureaucracy with virtually no oversight.
The plan would have merged together certain duties such as grass cutting, tree removal and flag maintenance to one single department to handle all assigned duties; but that apparently never happened.
At the Jan. 30 Public Services Committee meeting, employees of the Central Services Department struggled to figure out who was responsible for the maintenance of flags flying just outside the doors of the Municipal Building, when Central Services is the department tasked with flag maintenance.
Rather than ending the years-long duplication of services leading to the service not being performed has become the duplication of services with less responsibility when the service is not performed.
Douse favored hiring an outside firm to assist Parks and Rec Director Maurice McDowell to do his job properly, and at this point, neither McDowell or his multi-million dollar consultants can figure out if it is more cost effective to demolish or repair the ailing Boathouse at the Marina.
Under Douse’s “right sizing plan,” the city would divest itself of surplus land, and she devoted massive amounts of city resources at the Augusta Land Bank, including the $1 million in ARP funding as well as the funds to purchase the Weed School.
Douse sits on the Land Bank Authority as a full voting member.
Having access to that kind of access to information, Douse had to have been aware of the back room deals being made to shuffle around property, the massive raises given to the Land Bank staff and long evenings of feasts and cocktail parties charged to the taxpayers; yet, she never reported any of the Land Bank shenanigans to the commission or to the public.
In Augusta, rightsizing has meant an advertising campaign to counter panhandling instead of the strengthening of ordinances, code enforcement officers showing up unarmed to blighted properties offering lawn mower rental certificates and healthy trees uprooted while damaged or dying trees are left for nature to take its course.
Rightsizing has not reined in the size of government or created more efficiency; in fact it is the opposite, rightsizing has helped foster a “shadow government” operating out of the Tax Commissioner’s Office and has led to far more government waste and corruption.
Any commissioner that votes to make Douse the permanent administrator is putting their seal of approval on rightsizing that went wrong. Citizens should consider whether this is the government they want and if not, decide how to fix the matter.
