London Bridges Falling Down
US Airways unwittingly foiled an annual taxpayer-funded boondoggle from unfolding this weekend, when one of its jets developed mechanical problems and forced the cancellation of the Charlotte Chambers’ planned Inter-City Visit to London.
The chamber’s annual trip, in which business leaders pick up their own tab for the junket and taxpayers foot the freight for elected officials and various city and county staffers, is billed as a way for local leaders to learn lessons from far-flung locales about how to make Charlotte-Mecklenburg a better place to work and live. But mostly it’s a paid vacation for ranking government bureaucrats and politicos.
My favorite example of the Inter-City trip’s inherent hypocrisy came a few years back, when one of my reporters from The Rhino Times reached then-school board chairman Joe White during the group’s trip to Philadelphia. When tracked down by phone, White was ostensibly at a workshop for economic development ~ translation: eating a few hotdogs and downing some drinks at a Phillies game. Tough work. Grueling, some might say.
The taxpayer bill for this year’s five-day international jet set to London was about $48,000 to cover the tab for three city staffers – City Manager Curt Walton, assistant city manager Ruffin Hall and Deputy City Manager Ron Kimble – and city councilmembers Claire Fallon, David Howard, Michael Barnes, Patsy Kinsey, James Mitchell and LaWana Mayfield, as well as Mecklenburg County Manager Harry Jones and commissioners Harold Cogdell and Neil Cooksey.
Chamber spokesman Natalie Dick tells the uptown paper that taxpayers will be fully reimbursed for the cost of the trip to London. So we can at least thank US Airways for that; otherwise, as Dick makes painfully clear, we’d be out $48K. The cost to taxpayers, apparently, matters not the least in the chamber’s thinking.
… Dick acknowledged that concerns over taxpayer money arise every year around the Chamber trip, but said such concerns “had nothing to do with” the cancellation.
Nice to know where the concerns and hard-earned dollars of all us peasants stand. Now get in line for a new tax hike and move along, citizen.
It’s easy to dismiss the taxpayer cost of funding these annual Inter-City junkets because, granted, in the overall bucket of government spending $48,000 is a seriously tiny drop. But that would be missing the bigger point, along with the higher price.
The Inter-City trips, above and beyond a nice excuse for local officials to take a mini-vacation on somebody else’s dime, serve as a vehicle for those same officials to return with wild ideas for how to spend even more of your tax dollars on boondoggles, large and small. Case in point: the trip to Seattle a few years back ultimately led to Charlotte hiring former transit czar Ron Tober, who managed to chug down the tracks into light-rail spending oblivion here in the Queen City.
Who knows what kind of monstrosities our local crew of tax-and-spend politicos and Ivory Tower bureaucrats would have brought back from London? But it’s a safe bet that the junket would have ended up costing taxpayers far in excess of $48,000.
Take it away, Warren:
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