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Monday, November 9, 2009
Boomer with Attitude / News Commissioners, at least censure Harry Jones
Posted By John Grooms on Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 5:59 PM
County Manager Harry Jones must be awfully good at schmoozing the commissioners. That’s the only explanation I can find for the fact that rumors are not flying about Jones’ job being in jeopardy. That’s especially true after the daily paper’s Sunday story about the DSS “Case of the Disappearing Kids’ Christmas Money” fiasco, and Jones’ handling of it. As Fred Clasen-Kelly reported, Jones and other members of county government received an e-mail from a Bank of America employee named Harry Lomax, who criticized the county’s handling of the DSS mess.
“There seems to be a need for a wholesale cleanup of many county agencies, and I think that starts from the top down,” Lomax wrote. A week later, the “top” in “top down,” County Manager Harry Jones, forwarded a copy of Lomax’s e-mail to a BofA VP with the question, “Do you know Harry Lomax?” There’s no way to interpret Jones’ e-mail as anything but an attempt to quash Lomax’s complaints, but BofA seems to think Jones’ move was a good idea. The bank’s government liaison Betty Turner replied quickly to Jones, saying Lomax’s e-mail was “embarrassing” and that she was “tracking it down.”
As Jeff Taylor at the MeckDeck Web site aptly put it, this kind of behavior is reminiscent of “the time when uppity mill hands who questioned local leaders were met with, ‘What’s your name again? I know your pastor.’ The threat was clear — shut up and know your place.”
Jones’ ill temper and extreme defensiveness in the face of criticism — two deadly traits for a supposed public servant — come as no surprise to this writer. A few years ago when I held the editor position at CL, Tara Servatius wrote a lengthy expose of myriad problems in the county’s utilities department, specifically the miserable job they were doing controlling (or not controlling) sewage spills. Jones pitched a fit, and had his PR folks write up a massive reply to the story, which still didn’t satisfy our objections or refute our points, but that’s a whole other issue. What was most interesting was Jones’ fevered reaction to the story; at one point, he told the commissioners he was sending out copies of the county’s rebuttal, but not to Creative Loafing “because they don’t care about the truth.” Then-chairman Parks Helms had to remind Jones that he was obligated to send us a copy, and Mr. Big Stuff finally calmed down a little.
The latest example of Jones’ manner of operating falls in line with numerous previous reports of him treating county government as an Uptown good ol’ boys’ club. It's time the county commissioners did something about him. The DSS scandal; the continued payment of a full salary to a former employee in ill health; his recent bonus of nearly $40K during a time of cutbacks; followed now by his attempt to intimidate Mr. Lomax by appealing to the concerned citizen's boss, well, the pile has just gotten too high. Jones’ entrenchment and his snarling attitude toward criticism have become counterproductive to good governance. The Commission should censure Jones, take back the bonus (undeserved in any case, considering the DSS fiasco), and apologize to Lomax and the citizens of Mecklenburg County.
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