Jeff Schapiro of the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the latest example of an outrageous payment to a public servant: the 2x salary severance payment to the former head of the Virginia Retirement System (VRS). On the editorial page, a VRS board member who represents teachers bemoans justifying this action to the low-paid beneficiaries of the retirement fund.
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like every week we’re seeing state or local officials receiving huge payments or spending large sums of money on questionable activities. School superintendents are hired then summarily fired (with severance) with alarming frequency. High officials travel around the globe to learn about the latest thing, but rarely implement anything new.
Something’s wrong. Hiring practices and/or expectations are out of whack. We ought to stop a lot of this “national search” balderdash and start focusing on developing talent that can move up within organizations. We ought to select promising candidates from a diversity of backgrounds, not insist that hires have held the same job somewhere else (and somewhere else before that). We hire high-priced retreads who are represented by agents that negotiate lavish (by government standards) perks and severance packages upfront. We don’t check backgrounds as well as we should. We frequently don’t give new hires enough time to establish their leadership and we don’t start overseeing financial matters until they reach scandalous proportions.
I don’t want to hear this “you have to pay for talent” line, either. Sure you do, but there’s a price break point. We all know that the new outsider comes in and leans on the existing staff for everything. Surely there’s someone in every organization that could run the place as well as the high-priced resume. It’s tough to check out the high-priced resume; it’s a lot easier to know what someone who’s been in the organziation many years can do.
How anyone can claim the mantle of “public servant” while simultaneously grabbing outlandish cash and perks is beyond my comprehension.
One specific issue regarding VRS was interesting: Del. Leo Wardrup, Jr., R-VA Beach, criticized the Attorney General’s office for not monitoring the VRS more closely. Is that the AG’s job? Here’s a real live issue for the two AG candidates to debate, as opposed to “top-cop” peripherals.