43
How not to succeed in business
On the side
Wrong number: Labor union members, mostly from the Mahoning Valley, are making numerous telephone calls to U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson’s Washington, D.C., office urging him to vote against a bill in the Ohio House that severely restrict collective bargaining for state employees.
The biggest problem is the union members are calling the wrong house. Johnson of Poland, R-6th, is a member of the U.S. House. The collective-bargaining bill is a state issue and will be up for a vote shortly in the Ohio House.
The union members have called Johnson’s D.C. office a lot during the past two weeks.
Johnson’s staff is trying to put those who call the congressman’s office in touch with their Ohio House representative.
Based on information from those calling, the mistake seems to have originated with the international steelworkers union. The union is calling its members asking them to phone Johnson to urge him to vote against the bill.
In the span of a week, I had to rely on the government for two major stories that impact everyone in Ohio.
What I learned is that those who want to run government like a business have a long way to go. That is unless they want to run government like an ineffective businesses.
My first experience was with the U.S. Census Bureau.
Before Ohio’s census numbers were available on the agency’s website at 2 p.m. March 9, I did practice runs with other states that already had their information available.
It didn’t help because when Ohio’s numbers came out, I couldn’t access data for the cities, villages and townships in Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties.
I called the public information office dozens of times for two hours. The phone lines were so jammed that I couldn’t even be placed on hold or leave a message.
I obviously wasn’t alone in needing help.
Extremely helpful
I finally got through to a person who was extremely helpful. He walked me through the steps needed to gain access to data for places in Mahoning County.
It would probably take me the rest of the column to explain the method.
I had to do individual searches for each city, township and village in the county rather than see all the data on one page.
I tried to do the same with Trumbull and Columbiana counties, but that information wasn’t available for another hour.
Another problem is you have to take cities and villages out of townships to get accurate numbers. For example, Girard’s population was included in Liberty Township, Poland’s village population was included in Poland Township’s number.
But that’s not always the case. For example, the city of Warren’s population was in Warren Township’s number.
If the census wasn’t enough of a challenge, Gov. John Kasich’s proposed two-year state budget came next.
That was to be released this past Tuesday at noon on the state’s Office of Budget and Management website.
I don’t know what’s worse: getting on the census website and not being able to do anything or not being able to get on the state website at all.
System crash
The state computer staff apparently didn’t realize the amount of interest in the budget because the system crashed and was down for about 30 to 45 minutes.
The website then became accessible, but it took what seemed like an eternity to open up any of the documents. (In reality it was about an hour or two.)
The kicker was the budget summary, probably the most insightful document, wasn’t available for about four hours. Below the budget summary link was “coming soon.” Coming soon?
How could a document that’s been in the works for months, just waiting to be released by the Kasich administration at noon Tuesday be coming soon?
Looking back, it’s funny. But I wasn’t laughing at the time, and I’m sure others who wanted the governor’s budget proposal weren’t amused.
To those in government who want to run it like a business — I would guess a good business — you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you.