If it’s broke, fix it

“Government isn’t designed to do a whole lot. It’s working the way our founding fathers planned for it to.”

At least Tim Williams is being honest about where he’s coming from. The quote is from a story in the News Virginian on Sunday looking at the long-delayed South River Greenway, which I’ve been writing about since my first couple of years in local journalism.

Dirt is finally supposed to turn on the project sometime next year, though I’ll believe that when I see it happening. Three city managers and four mayors, including Williams, have made similar pronouncements over the years.

To be fair, a big part of the holdup is the complexity of getting property owners along the river to sign off on having people walking and biking in their residential and corporate backyards. We’re not talking about a project where the city is, say, the owner of a parcel of land with the money and all the i’s dotted and all the t’s crossed just twiddling its thumbs waiting for Christmas.

The characterizations to the otherwise in the story from Williams and his successor as mayor, Frank Lucente, are interesting in and of themselves.

“It always takes a long time to get anything done. That’s the way government is supposed to work. You’re not supposed to be able to snap your fingers and get things done,” Williams said.

“That’s just the way government works. It’s bad when you want something done, and good when you don’t want something done,” Lucente said

What they’re giving us there is boilerplate that we all learned in civics class in school about how our government has three branches that all have checks and balances on each other, but what we learned about in school was the federal government, not City Hall. Waynesboro doesn’t have a strong-mayor form of government with an elected executive and a court system that regularly tests the constitutionality of acts taken by the executive and the legislative branch. Lucente as mayor is a member of the City Council that hires a city manager to run the day-to-day business of city government, who does so in accord with direction provided by the Council that itself is in accord with the powers vested in it by the Virginia General Assembly.

Which is to say, City Hall, unlike the federal government designed by our founding fathers, should be able to run like any business out there with a board of directors that hires a CEO to run the day-to-day affairs in accord with what can be done within relevant local, state and federal laws and regulations.

As a small-business owner myself, I see a lot of similarity in how the city should be doing its business and how I do mine. The key to whatever success I’ve been fortunate to have in eight years of building and running my business has been by focusing on two big-deal things – focusing on the bottom line and getting the job done.

If for a second I as a small-business owner or any CEO out there heading up a big corporation thought that there was something gumming up the works that kept us from getting the job done and improving the bottom line, we’d either fix it or see somebody else who could figure out how to do it better have our lunch.

This notion that it takes 12 years to build a greenway because that’s the way government is supposed to work is bunk. Fix it, or get out of the way so somebody who can fix it is able to do so.