The Bonehead Budget Award
2011-08-08 - by
Linda Hayes, the secretary of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, is this monthâs winner of the Thom Tillis Bonehead Budget Award.
Speaker Tillis, you recall, put state government on a diet, then gave his staff fat raises.
Hayes wins for complaining about budget cuts and then, according to a TAPster, âclosing a couple of youth development centers and laying off workers who handle court-ordered commitments and supervise youths when theyâre released from custody. In other words, she slashed the people providing the services directly to people who need them.â
But check out her departmentâs website âLeadershipâ page. It lists:
· A cabinet-level secretary (Hayes)
· A chief operating officer
· Five deputy secretaries
· Fifteen central office department heads
· Four area administrators
Iâm hoping she has made management cuts and the website needs updating. But the TAPster has a different prediction:
âMy guess is that she didnât touch the jobs of 26 fellow bureaucrats in her kingdom who probably havenât laid eyes on a juvenile delinquent in months. The bigger tragedy: multiply this travesty by all the kingdoms and fiefdoms in state governmentâ¦.This is why people hate state government.â
The Bonehead Budget Award
2011-08-08/
Linda Hayes, the secretary of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, is this monthâs winner of the Thom Tillis Bonehead Budget Award.
Speaker Tillis, you recall, put state government on a diet, then gave his staff fat raises.
Hayes wins for complaining about budget cuts and then, according to a TAPster, âclosing a couple of youth development centers and laying off workers who handle court-ordered commitments and supervise youths when theyâre released from custody. In other words, she slashed the people providing the services directly to people who need them.â
But check out her departmentâs website âLeadershipâ page. It lists:
· A cabinet-level secretary (Hayes)
· A chief operating officer
· Five deputy secretaries
· Fifteen central office department heads
· Four area administrators
Iâm hoping she has made management cuts and the website needs updating. But the TAPster has a different prediction:
âMy guess is that she didnât touch the jobs of 26 fellow bureaucrats in her kingdom who probably havenât laid eyes on a juvenile delinquent in months. The bigger tragedy: multiply this travesty by all the kingdoms and fiefdoms in state governmentâ¦.This is why people hate state government.â