Dear Source,
Many times the executive and/or legislative branches call for emergency declarations and actions. These actions usually are declared to be necessary for expediency to get around the bureaucratic red tape.
Expediency is expensive. With each emergency, funds are wasted due to the lack of competitive bidding and the necessity for overtime payments. With each emergency, it indicates failure: failure of a person's not doing his/her work; failure of an executive to do planning; failure of the organization to accommodate situational variations.
Declaring an emergency is no solution. The solution is to change the organizational problems of a defunct system created in 1954 [with the Revised Organic Act] and earlier.
Whatever happened to forward planning? Whatever happened to computerization — across the board? Most emergencies elsewhere are created by "Acts of God" and/or "War." What is the cause of our emergencies? In most cases, our brand of emergencies results from the lack of forward planning and refusal to correct an ancient bureaucratic system which cannot work in the year 2003.
With our current potential of bankruptcy, we can no longer afford to maintain a system which cannot work and which cannot avoid emergencies. Someone in the bureaucratic system is usually responsible for failure. Perhaps it's time for politically incorrect finger-pointing to become in vogue.
We can no longer afford most of our "emergencies." If some feel they cannot be avoided, then perhaps it's time for executive-declared "emergencies" to be approved by the Legislature and overseen by the Office of Inspector General. Can we afford to do otherwise?
Robert V. Vaughn, Ed.D.
St. Croix
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