Close enough for government work?

Let's talk shop.

The last three months have seen millions of government workers looking over their shoulder, wondering if the pink slip axe was about to fall on them. The Department of Government Efficiency has attempted to create that very thing, but of course Job One for a bureaucrat is keeping his job, so these goals were incompatible. Yet many of them may land on their feet by taking similar public-sector jobs at the state and municipal level - it may mean they have to relocate (and maybe take a pay cut) but anything to stay on that gravy train, right?

And it wouldn’t be forever, says Allentown, Pennsylvania Mayor Matthew Tuerk. “This opportunity for somebody to kind of treat this like a sabbatical from their federal job is really neat. There’s people who can come work for two or three years, make a really significant impact in a place that maybe hasn’t gotten a lot of love in the past for employment.” Obviously they’re treating this as four years in the wilderness, just like any other change of political party in Washington, D.C.

Maybe that’s the ticket for those folks, but it’s telling that most of the states and municipalities seeking furloughed federal workers are those of the Democrat persuasion. To be honest, I’m shocked Delaware isn’t trying harder; then again, they can barely afford the workers they have.

But let me give you the perspective of one who has to occasionally work with government to perform his job.

There is one area of government that my cohorts and I most regularly deal with, and that’s the aspect of planning and zoning. Normally this is handled in a local jurisdiction (oftentimes the county, but some municipalities as well) and I’ve found over the years that some are easy to deal with while others (particularly in the area around bigger cities) are a complete pain in the ass. Those people are the ones who give government a bad name because they seem to be in it to maintain their jobs and show you who’s boss, not to make life easier for those who are investing their time and money into building a dream. It’s like fixing the honest mistakes and missteps that occur in every project (like a last-second change at the client’s request that didn’t get followed all the way through) only leads to the opportunity to find more issues. Instead of one “jack-of-all-trades” building official who is open to alternate methods of compliance, a big city or county will have one for each specialty and you run on THEIR schedule. You would think designing to what’s become a standardized building code in the International Building Code over the years would be easy, but they make it harder than it should be.

(To show my age, I go back to the days where there were three building codes adopted in certain areas of the country: BOCA - which I was most familiar with being in Ohio, as it was adopted in the East and Midwest - UBC from out West, and Standard, or Southern, Building Code, which ironically came as far north as Sussex County, Delaware.)

Now I’ll grant that I had an awakening when I moved from Ohio to Maryland back in 2004 and found out how much more effort went into site design and stormwater drainage here than back home - to a point where more of the time and resources go to civil work than designing the building and its envelope - but it still can be manageable. What began in Maryland has become pretty much the standard all over.

But if that wasn’t bad enough, try having government as your client.

I began my career way back in the mid-1980s working for a firm that predominantly did schools, which was a sort of government work since you contracted with the local school district and state funding was often involved. But the extent of the bureaucracy was in the bidding process, which was dictated to us and done in the interest of not favoring one bidder over another. That was the work of the administrator; as a junior draftsman I just had to make sure the drawings were drawn accurately and up to code.

On the other hand, the red tape involved in even a simple tenant improvement project done for a governmental entity makes me want to tear out the diminishing amount of hair I still have. While it’s not to the scale that federal regulations stymied the ambitious goal of building hundreds of EV charging stations, it’s the kind of thing that makes an otherwise simple week-long job drag out to a month or more. On those jobs I feel like I have to answer to the Department of Redundancy Department.

Needless to say, we don’t take a whole lot of those because they’re generally money pits. I guess that’s why there are firms that do a lot of government work and can charge the fees to make it profitable (hey, it’s only taxpayer money.)

It’s for this group of people who are in it to bottle up progress that I say the world needs ditchdiggers, too. Unfortunately, it appears that other branches of government want to keep them from becoming honest workers.

And for those who celebrate, like me: Happy 419 Day to all my Northwest Ohio homies. (Better weather than Delaware gets on March 2, or 302.)

In the meantime, though, you can Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now.