It’s The Media’s Fault
Or at least that’s part of the rationale offered by the city’s top spokesperson for the skyrocketing number of, well, spokespersons on the city’s payroll.
About half of her time on the job, Kim McMillan explains, is “spent coordinating public records requests from the media,” and she singles out nontraditional media for much of the blame. “They need the same level of service (as traditional media),” she tells the uptown paper of record. “It’s public information.”
Bloggers and others of the nontraditional-media ilk must be crawling out of the woodwork. The number of employees in the city’s core corporate communications division has ballooned to 19 full-time staffers, with an annual budget that tops $2 million. And that’s not counting any of the PR wizards spinning away within individual city departments. Charlotte Area Transit System, for example, has a $2.8 million budget for marketing and communications; marketing being critical, of course, because CATS faces so much competition.
City communications is making headlines these days in the wake of Mayor Anthony Foxx, a Democrat, bringing yet another professional communicator into the fold. Erica Johnson is pocketing $70,000 a year as the mayor’s new spokesperson, who isn’t a spokesperson (Foxx bristles at the moniker, insisting that he will still speak for himself and that Johnson’s role will be to assist with community outreach).
Foxx also takes issue with claims that the new hire added a new job to the city’s payroll. The official line is that the position was pulled from a vacancy in the city manager’s office; despite a hiring freeze implemented by the city manager.
It’s unclear how long the new job that isn’t a new job for a spokesperson that isn’t a spokesperson was posted, if it ever was, or how many other applicants responded. A request for answers to those questions is still pending, likely with one of the city’s myriad public communications experts.
The question is important, however, given the scandal last year at the county’s Department of Social Services, when an administration official pulling down a fat, six-figure salary was hired after the job had been posted for all of one day and the county was under a hiring freeze.
The official who was hired? That would be Foxx’s wife, Samara, who was brought on board as “special assistant” to the DSS director and later headed the department’s amorphous business affairs division. She resigned from the position in January, after her husband had been elected mayor.
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