Help a kid by firing Harry Jones 

Would somebody please just fire Harry Jones?

It's becoming clear that, as Mecklenburg County manager, he's in way over his head. The present crop of politicians running the county commission may be as well.

The last straw was the theft of $30,000 from foster children -- foster children mind you -- by a county Department of Social Services employee who treated a charity run by the department as a personal slush fund.

Last week, DSS worker Cindy Brady pleaded guilty to three counts of embezzlement. Federal prosecutors are seeking forfeiture of up to $112,222, The Charlotte Observer reported.

In an organization as large as county government, sooner or later, someone is going to embezzle something. The real issue here is the breathlessly shoddy management that the theft exposed.

When a new manager took over at DSS, she began asking questions after hearing reports of past irregularities. That investigation not only uncovered $160,000 in unaccounted for transactions at the charity known as the Giving Tree, but details about how it was run.

Things were so out of control at DSS that the charity had been operating without any accounting rules or guidelines for years. (One former volunteer tells me county employees had actually been robbing the charity blind for more than a decade, which led her to split off and form a separate children's Christmas gift program to avoid the fraud and thievery.) Over time, county employees deposited tens of thousands of dollars donated by well-meaning people for the purchase of children's Christmas gifts directly into their own personal checking accounts.

This was possible, in part, because the county's social services department hadn't been audited by the county since 1996, despite a more than doubling of its funding. Apparently, no one running the county was concerned about this.

Worse yet, Jones fought scrutiny of the program, personally attacked a donor who complained by trying to get him in trouble with his employer at Bank of America, then insisted there was no problem. Jones then did an audit of the program and claimed county management could account for all of the $162,000 that was spent by the Giving Tree the year before. Though law enforcement hadn't finished its investigation, Jones repeated this over and over. So did County Commission Chair Jennifer Roberts, who wrote it in a November Observer editorial.

I don't know what kind of audit these people did, but as it turns out, Jones and the county hadn't accounted for the money at all. Brady had used at least $30,000 of it to pay off her own bills, federal investigators found.

All along, Brady said her supervisors had approved the transfers into her bank account. Either that's true, or they simply didn't notice that more than $100,000 had floated out the door. Either way, we're dealing with gross and potentially criminal mismanagement.

Who are these supervisors? Are they still working for the county?

In an interview last Wednesday, Roberts said she didn't know the answers to these questions despite a year of controversy over this. Jones, even with prodding from Republicans and one Democrat on the Commission, has shown zero interest in holding these supervisors accountable. (That assumes, of course, that Jones even knows who is/was in charge in his own social services department.)

Again, these supervisors oversaw, maybe even facilitated, theft from the county's most vulnerable children. If that doesn't disqualify you from continuing your career with Mecklenburg County government, what does? Apparently, as we've learned in this case, the answer is a federal indictment.

It gets worse. The investigations so far have only gone back about two years. Were DSS employees defrauding children before that? Despite demands from some members of the board, Jones, abetted by Roberts's silence, has stubbornly refused to look under that rock and won't have to until Roberts or someone else on the board produces five votes to make him.

This nearly criminal indifference is the height of irony from the "for the kids" crowd, who are now shutting down libraries and maybe even schools because they overspent on the construction of schools, parks and other amenities "for the kids."

It's the kind of financial mismanagement you'd expect out of some backward, run-down, Rust Belt hellhole like Detroit. For this county to have to shut down its libraries because Jones badly mismanaged our debt estimates is mortifying. Do you see any other North Carolina cities shutting down their libraries? All of them are struggling in the recession, but their management didn't tie them into the fiscal pretzel Jones has tied us into. It got so bad at one point a few years ago that the Charlotte Chamber had to write county leaders a letter informing them that they couldn't actually afford to pay for all the bonds they intended to put on the ballot.

Now we're reaping what Jones sowed in that era. To businesses considering relocating here, library and school shutdowns are a red flag to stay away.

Should Jones be fired? Roberts told me last week, essentially, that he shouldn't, but said he should lose his annual bonus. Would he get fired for this in the private sector? She didn't really have an answer for that one.