Domo arigato, Mr. $2,000 Robocall
Need more evidence that townships are an obsolete, unneeded, wasteful layer of government that we’d be better off eliminating? Well, that evidence was annoying you at home on Friday and spending $2,000 of your taxes to do so.
St. Clair Township Highway Commissioner Skip Kernan used his finely honed political instincts to decide a robocall was needed to draw attention to the fact that he was in a competition of a forceful urinary nature with the town supervisor and trustees. That robocall cost $2,000 to announce his five highway workers were laid off because he’d blown his budget by adding a worker without approval.
When asked about the added worker, he didn’t respond about the volume of work or needs of taxpayers. Kernan said prior highway commissioners had five or six and it was within his power, so he needed to expand his fiefdom.
Trouble is he didn’t have the money or approval to hire the extra worker, did it against the wishes of township trustees and then tried to do some budget shuffling to cover as much as $80,000 for the worker plus benefits. Trustees objected to a new worker because Kernan contracts out much of the road work.
“He knew the money wasn’t going to be there,” Township Supervisor Dave Barnes said. “The money wasn’t there and a majority of the board thought he had enough employees and he could spend money to fix roads. Now, he’s trying to blame someone else for his mistake.”
St. Clair Township has 60 miles of bits and pieces of roadway that could easily be handled by municipal or county government. Taxes that support this redundancy, not to mention these political shenanigans, are just wasted in a state that leads the nation with 6,968 layers of local government.
Belleville Township’s 81 cents of overhead to deliver 19 cents of help to the poor, Caseyville Township’s sewer tap-on extortion racket and mystery hard drives in cake tins and St. Clair Township’s prior hijinx with Swansea and the sewer rate two-step are all evidence of how much better off we’d be eliminating and outlawing township governments.
This story was originally published March 22, 2016 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Domo arigato, Mr. $2,000 Robocall."