Cambridge Bureaucrats - Paragons of Pettifoggery

Well, the CCC(Crusading Cambridge Chronicle) continues to hound our gallivanting rogue mayor over his travel receipts. And RR (Rascally Reeves) and his cohorts continue to engage in pettifogging stonewalling.

It seems that instead of just doing the decent thing and forking over the receipts(they are public records after all), Reeves and his pals at City Hall are being as petulantly refractory as possible, even going so far as to drag in the poor Deputy City Solicitor to send out a stationary bill:

The city asked the Chronicle for more money this week to look at Mayor Ken Reeves’ travel receipts.

The Chronicle gave City Solicitor Don Drisdell a check for $130.85 on Feb. 26.

“We have exhausted $130.85, the full amount of your payment of the above estimate, which you paid by check dated February 15, 2007,” states a letter sent March 14 from Deputy City Solicitor Nancy Glowa.

Glowa said the city auditor would need an additional $38.03 to continue the public records request.

The fee would cover an additional two hours worth of work — at $15.21 per hour — for a city employee to compile the receipts. City officials had previously estimated that it would take only five hours to fill the public records request.
The Chronicle plans to pay the additional fee.

Now, although it is bizarre to go after Reeves for not keeping travel receipts which he was not obligated to keep , still, it surely presents a merry spectacle: seeing our pompous fool of a faux mayor getting his ass kicked when he is so used to getting it kissed!

Note the breathtaking imperiousness of the Cambridge bureaucracy: arrogantly charging annoyance fees for public records. By the way, the Chronicle is wrong to cave in and pay the fees. Both morally and perhaps practically. About a year ago, some petty tyrant in Inspectional Services tried to make Cambridge Citizen cough up some bucks for copying public documents. Cambridge Citizen ignored her and went to her boss, who personally copied the documents for free! If the City really wanted to hand over the documents without hassle, it could do so very easily.There is mucho discretion in such matters.

But, in all fairness to the Chronicle, they probably had no such option. In this case they seem to be up against the Cambridge bureaucracy in all its pettifogging glory.

All bureaucracies tend towards petty arrogance, insulated as they are by civil service rules and unions. This tendency is exacerbated in Cambridge. The Cambridge bureaucracy, like Cambridge itself, is different. It is even more cut off from the people than ordinary bureaucracies. In a normal city the bureaucrats are supervised directly by a mayor elected by all the people. A Cambridge bureaucrat answers primarily to a Super Bureaucrat(aka the City Manager), who in turn is hired by City Clowncillors, all of whom are elected at large according to a perverse system of proportional representation which ensures that their real concern is not the people as a whole but the cultivation of their own little voter clique.

No wonder the Cambridge bureaucracy is so often totally out of control.

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