Call the Governor, tell her to veto HB 2650

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Sometimes the Arizona Daily Star shows flashes of its former greatness with an editorial reminiscent of what it used to publish in its glory days. Today is one of of those flashes of greatness. Kudos. Merit system of employment needs to remain:

A bill that essentially scraps the merit system of employment in all county governments (except Maricopa County) makes exactly zero sense to us. It would reopen the door to old-style patronage political governance.

The governor must veto HB 2650.

To begin: Why would the merit system remain in place in one county, but effectively be ended in all the others? It's unclear how that happened, because the bill took its final form in the wee hours of the Legislature's last session before adjournment on April 20. There were no public hearings or debate on the measure as passed.

That's one major problem with the HB 2650. But the other problem also is monumental:

Remember Tammany Hall? The Pendergast machine in Kansas City? The Daley organization in Chicago? All these notorious, often-corrupt political organizations were built atop a foundation of political patronage – insiders taking care of insiders who in turn were beholden to the bosses who protected them.

Remember Waldon V. Burr? He was Pima County sheriff from 1958 to 1971. Toward the end of his tenure, a deputy revealed that he'd paid Burr $600 for his job.

Then following an investigation, in 1971, a grand jury indicted Burr on 22 felony charges, including accusations of taking bribes and selling appointments to Sheriff's Department positions. The charges were dropped when Burr, who died in 1988, resigned.

One of the commanders who had also faced charges in the case, Albert M. Felix, later told the Tucson Citizen that his eight years under Burr were like "a political circus."

"Every two years, you were threatened with the loss of your job unless you supported the sheriff for re-election. It was a monster created by society itself," Felix said.

That's because there was no merit system of employment in place during the Burr years; as a result politics and connections often reigned in making hiring decisions, and in evaluating and promoting employees.

And that's the patronage system that Legislature proposes to reinstate – or at least is inviting its re-emergence with this ill-conceived bill.

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[T]he [merit-]system's protections are designed to ensure that hiring, promotion, demotion and firing decisions are based on performance in public service – to assure that county employees work for the taxpayers, not for bosses to whom they are beholden.

"The whole reason we have merit jobs in the first place is so you don't have people firing competent civil servants and replacing them with political supporters.

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Merit-system protections are unquestionably imperfect. They create bureaucracies; they can stymie creativity.

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We welcome carefully vetted reforms of the merit system. In Pima County, it's been in place since 1974, according to County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry.

But the mirror-image of a merit-based employment system is not the solution to its weaknesses. A wide-open, at-will approach to filling public-service jobs is dangerous – civil-service employment systems were designed to reform abuses. If HB 2650 becomes law, taxpayers would pay the price.

Gov. Jan Brewer has until Monday to act; she must veto HB 2650.

Call Gov. Brewer at 1-(800) 253-0883 (It's toll-free!) or visit her Web page to leave a message to veto HB 2650.