“When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.†— Harry S Truman.
Dear City-County Observer:
When I told Evansville Courier & Press reporter Thomas Langhorne that “Government was not meant to be efficient. Government was meant to be fair,†during a recent interview, I asked him to make sure he put that comment into context.
In his weekend article, I feel Langhorne did exactly that, because he continued that quote with my full statement:
“There are departments in the Civic Center that exist as a check and balance for another department, to keep corruption out and keep somebody from running away with the kitty,” the Courier & Press article continued. “Davis cited as examples the county auditor and the county treasurer, the budget-writing County Council and the executive County Commissioners, and the two houses of the Legislature.
“If I have a whiz bang idea for the treasurer’s office, I’ve got to go in front of the council and get funding for it. I’ve got to tell them, ‘This is a really good thing,’ and they can go, ‘Great, here’s your funding,'” Davis said. “But I’ve also got to go in front of the commissioners and convince them it’s the right thing. And if they’ve got to sign a contract and they don’t, I can have all the funding in the world and it doesn’t matter.
“It’s a check and a balance to make sure that I as an officeholder am doing the right things for the taxpayer, regardless of party. “
As your Vanderburgh County Treasurer, I feel I have run an efficient office. For instance:
* After the county invested in a new property tax billing software, I felt that we didn’t need 13 employees to conduct business in the Treasurer’s Office anymore. When a co-worker resigned in 2009 to take a better paying job elsewhere in the county, I did not seek a replacement employee. Our office has managed just fine, and at a savings of $90,000+ total in pay and benefits to taxpayers so far since I made that decision.
* Your Vanderburgh County property tax bill was being produced in South Carolina under an agreement signed by the previous Treasurer’s administration – with a budget costing taxpayers $65,000 per year. Now we print those bills in-house at a savings of $50,000 per year – $200,000 total – and we buy our envelopes and paper from Evansville businesses, not in South Carolina. That keeps our property tax dollars in our local economy and not South Carolina’s.
* Because we now control the printing process, your property tax bill now gets to your mailbox an average of 83% quicker! From 2003 to 2009, Vanderburgh County taxpayers only had on average of 18 days advance notice from the postmark on their bill to the due date. We have improved that average advance notice to 33 days! Now THAT is efficiency!
My point during my comment about government is this: Why do we have a 435-member House of Representatives and a 100-member Senate? It would certainly be cheaper and more efficient to have just one house and not two, right? Why do we elect a governor and our mayors and county commissioners? Why can’t our President just appoint our governors, who then appoint our mayors and commissioners at the local level? Why go through the expense of campaign elections at all when we can just have powers that be appoint our local leaders?
The answer: Because government was meant to be representative and fair. As Harry S Truman said: “When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.â€
Our government was designed by our forefathers — a group of people who were truly oppressed — to allow for the rights of people and for our ability to own property. So in a sense, the fact that our local government doesn’t run as fast as we’d ideally like it to sometimes is because our oppressed forefathers actually placed these barriers TO PROTECT US from irresponsible decisions being made by our government. I don’t want to make it easier for our government to trample our rights. “Fast†government does not particularly mean “responsive†government.
I leave you with this point: The LAST THING we want for local government is to have the Civic Center run wild like a bull through a China shop – running roughshod over our civil rights and our property rights. And that’s what I meant when I said “Government wasn’t meant to be efficient. Government was meant to be fair.†As an officeholder I have a record of finding efficiencies. But as a government, our system of checks and balances is inefficient – but our forefathers put these checks and balances in place for a good reason, to keep government from being corrupt.
Sincerely,
Rick Davis
Vanderburgh County Treasurer
The Pott College of Science, Engineering, and Education and the Geology and Physics department at the University of Southern Indiana, along with the Indiana-Kentucky Geological Society, Illinois Geological Society, and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, will host several public events in November to address the demand for energy in the world and the ethical and environmental issues associated with extraction of natural resources.
