Mark Orme says he has been working without an administrative assistant and wants to hire one.
He can’t seem to afford a babysitter either – in all the years I’ve been attending these meetings and all the single mothers I know who work for the city, Orme is the first employee I’ve seen bring his kid to work. The wife was out of town with the other kid, he said, so he had to leave work to pick up kid Number 2 at school before he could make a Local Gov Committee meeting. The boy was perfectly well behaved, but needed his dad’s attention now and then – wouldn’t you? I think it’s inappropriate for a guy who makes that kind of money to bring a little distraction to work with him, but that’s my point of view.
Here’s my other point of view – this guy is part of the team that fired all the lower level employees – you know, the workers? – to give himself and several other suits big, BIG raises. He’s making almost $200,000/year in salary alone, I think he should have to be his own secretary. I mean, come on, you’d expect a guy that makes that kind of money to come with a couple of clones. For what we pay that guy, we should really get at least 2 and a half people. The least he can do, is take his own notes, answer his own phones, pick up his own lunch.
Or, he can hire somebody out of his own salary, and pay that person himself.
Chico Taxpayers Association 
Hey, I’d have no problem if he brought his kid into his office while he does paperwork or makes phone calls. However a meeting is different, the kids should be elsewhere.
One problem we have in the City Government is that it’s too top heavy with managers, and not enough people who really do the work. We need to get rid of this nonsense of assistant managers, and assistants. Especially in a city this size. They also need to stop spending time in endless meetings.
He has what, eight departments? So his job is to supervise eight managers. How tough is that?
Thanks Jim, you said what I was thinking. Our city is woefully top heavy with a bunch of talking heads who can’t do the work that needs to be done. I actually know a woman who was Lando’s assistant, she was very competent and paid less than $50,000/year. She’s been with the city for years, along with other classified staffers, she paid more of a share of her benefits than her management overseers, while making less than half the salary of her supervisor Debbie Presson. When I asked Chris Constantin what had become of her, he made some really rude remarks about her and said she’d been demoted to some sort of support position for the fire department. She’s a single mother with two kids starting out in college.
The picture I got from Constantin was a regular old Roman style purge. They got rid of employees, or demoted them, or sent them to other departments, based on weird loyalties and downright grudges.
I also agree on the bringing of children to work. I used to bring my kids to those meetings, for home school. That’s how we learned about local government. I remember when Bryan was about six, he sat patiently and attentively listening to Scott Gruendl try to broach the subject of our pending financial doom. Gruendl had one of those big drawing pads on a tripod, and he was using a handful of colored pens to doodle what he was trying to say. At one point he started to use the red pen, but stopped himself – “don’t want to scare people!” But he should have been scaring people, they knew it was bad way back then (my kid is 20 now). He just kept messing up one page after another, scribbling nothing, flipping through that virgin tree pulp like it was toilet paper! Scratch a little more, chatter nervously – he just didn’t want to say, “We spent you into a hole!”
Later Bryan observed, “if the city is in so much trouble, what’s Scott doing with all those pens?” The paper waste bothered him, and the fact that Scott was not replacing the caps on the pens when he wasn’t using them, letting them get dried out. At six Bryan could see the root of our financial problems, and he was disgusted.
But Orme’s kid was nervous because he was in a roomful of strangers. His father had talked to us about him like he wasn’t in the room, instead of introducing him around and telling him what we’d be talking about, giving him an opportunity to relate to the rest of us. Orme gave him a little computer tablet and told him to do his homework. The poor little tyke kept tugging at his dad’s elbow, asking for help with his homework, and Orme would help him a little, then send him back to his chair. It was distracting – not the least reason being, he was a damn cute kid, and his homework sounded interesting. If I had been Orme I’d have postponed the meeting ahead, and spent the afternoon with my kid, but that’s me. The appropriate thing for he and his wife to do, knowing this was going to come up, was get a babysitter or send him to a friend’s house.