Mill Creek cuts expose harsh reality

I’ve spent the week looking for a Vindicator story that detailed how a government leader took $900,000 in wages and converted them to another use for taxpayers.

I couldn’t find such a story. If anyone out there finds one in our recent past, email it to me. That’s what I’m pondering as we set up coverage plans for Monday’s board meeting of Mill Creek MetroParks.

It’s the first huddle since Executive Director Aaron Young cut 13 jobs in a plan to direct more tax dollars to operational needs and away from salaries.

And that action – which jettisoned many veteran workers, including a couple of beloved staffers – is being attacked. These aren’t just basic complaints – more like, “Game of Thrones” attacks.

The park’s activist population is a collection of unique interests – avid gardeners, hikers, bikers, golfers, geese lovers, anti-frackers and more. If you ever wondered if a single event could bring together that diverse population, well, this is it.

Neither the killing of hundreds of geese nor the E. coli infestation of the lakes last summer generated as big of a mass gathering as the 200-plus people who met last week to harness their anger to address Young and the five-member board Monday.

I get part of the displeasure.

I knew two of the departed staffers, benefitted from their skills and thought highly of them. I sat with Ray Novotny several times and enjoyed a Sunday walk on the Horseshoe Trail. I had fun exchanging ideas with Perry Toth as the park reopened pond skating two winters ago.

If I were among the six in power at the park, I know I would have pushed for a better parting. I hope I would have found one, albeit knowing that those kinds of separations are always touchy.

But that’s where my feelings part with the tone of many board opponents. I don’t agree with the civic execution many are seeking of the board, Young and even Judge Rusu, who oversees the structure.

My parting is based on dollars and on principle.

My reductions might not have been Ray or Perry or Keith Kaiser at Fellows Riverside Gardens – the other beloved staffer. But it would have been someone. I suppose it could have been a throng of seasonal workers. But that puts veteran managers into roles they’ve long abandoned.

I might have taken aim at lower-waged full-timers. But don’t kid yourself: The same scenario would still exist. All employees have friends, family and well-wishers.

Which brings us to the harsh reality within the Mill Creek operations: There is staff inefficiency.

Where you best learn about park inefficiencies is with ex-staffers – if you get them to talk openly. And when you do, some admit a slight sense of admiration at the courage Young displayed to address the need.

And that’s what I guess concerns me most moving forward.

So I tried to find examples where leaders moved $900,000 in tax funds away from salaries and into operations.

The headlines I find seem counter:

Clerks who get clothing allowances when they never go outside the office.

Stubborn departments who miraculously find savings in overtime costs when faced with staff reductions.

Raises rolling out from property-tax-based operations despite home foreclosures stacking up around them.

Political leaders supporting indicted office holders in re-elections – only to introduce them to the underside of a bus the second voters said no.

And indictment after indictment after indictment ...

That’s a quick summary of the things that often happen with our taxes.

They do not happen with all our taxes. I think more good things happen with our taxes than bad.

But what causes bad things to happen? I would bet what tops the list would be an organization that has had more bosses than any other in the past nine years.

So here comes a new leader. And Young is also a new-generation leader – not beholden to a political party, or his dad, or a donor, or an activist faction, or his former employer. He looks at an organizational structure and dares to say something that nine years of leaders could not and nine years of leadership change allowed.

Young is at the tip of a new generation of millennial leaders. Millennials think and act differently than their parents. They reopen dilapidated downtown storefronts and dare to rebuild in abandoned neighborhoods. They want to help where they choose and not where the institutions say.

Where jobs don’t exist, they create them. They spend less, save more. They’re not perfect. They make mistakes. And they are kind of stubborn when they do.

I don’t believe Young will be the last of tough decision-makers that we will see, even if he flees or is chased from office like his predecessors.

But watching where we’ve been as a community, where the park has been the past 10 years and where our society is headed, I hope he stays.

It was an ugly process he orchestrated. But harsh truth is rarely easy truth.

Getting worked up about how Young did it may cost the community the chance to see the necessity of what he did.

Todd Franko is editor of The Vindicator. He likes emails about stories and our newspaper. Email him at tfranko@vindy.com. He blogs, too, on Vindy.com. Tweet him, too, at @tfranko.