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EDITORIAL
Looking in the wrong places
(Published January 26, 2004)

It’s become all too common for someone to demand a "national search" to find a qualified replacement when a D.C. government manager leaves his or her job.

Unfortunately for the District’s residents and taxpayers, these national searches have often turned up mediocre managers with inflated resumes or retreads who couldn’t hold their previous jobs – who are then showered by our elected officials with weighty praise, high salaries and bonuses before they even demonstrate performance.

Equally unfortunate is the sad fact that many of these managers have been sent packing after a brief stint in the nation’s capital, their suitcases bulging with even more unwarranted rewards from the taxpayers in the form of hefty severance packages.

That’s not to say that every D.C. government manager who has been lured here through a national search is incompetent.

But the whole process that assumes leadership and managerial skills transfer easily from one city government to another is seriously flawed. Unlike business, where companies within an industry often operate with a similar set of standards, no city works exactly like any other city. And Washington, D.C., has a government structure and history of citizen-government interaction that is unique among all cities in the United States.

The notion that continually bringing in managers from outside the District of Columbia will somehow miraculously transform the D.C. government into a collection of model agencies from other cities is simply ludicrous.

It doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked here after too many years of trying to make it work.

It’s also expensive. It’s been a gravy train for the handful of companies that conduct these national searches – with the cost to taxpayers of a planned national search for a new D.C. Public Schools superintendent estimated to approach $100,000. And if Interim Superintendent Elfreda W. Massie is ultimately retained in the job, taxpayers will still have to pay for a national search.

It’s time for the District’s elected officials, as well as the forever-meddling Congress, to stop discounting and denigrating the knowledge and skills of D.C. residents – especially native Washingtonians – and longtime D.C. government workers.

People who are qualified to run the D.C. government are already here. The District’s elected leaders should invest the thousands of dollars they readily spend at the drop of a hat on national searches to create a system that (1) continually trains D.C. government workers to improve their skills, (2) rewards both outstanding performance and innovative thinking that increases efficiency of service delivery, and (3) promotes from within.

The much-improved performance of the D.C. Department of Public Works under Director Leslie Hotaling’s leadership is a prime example that promoting from within can work. Hotaling, one of few current D.C. agency managers who came up through the ranks, recently announced she will retire in April after 25 years of service in the D.C. government.

A qualified successor to Hotaling, who can hit the ground running, most certainly can be found without elected officials wasting tax dollars on yet another national search.