County Must Fight Phantom Worker Menace

The deadline for paying property taxes came and went last week, and, as usual, I made my check out to Hal Pittman, tax collector.

I don’t know Hal Pittman. By all accounts, he is a decent man who does a fine job. Unfortunately, he’ll have to go.

With the county trying to scramble out of the financial hole it’s dug for itself, we must demand that government behave more like business.

That means painful choices. It means we can no longer afford the luxury of high-paid American workers doing jobs that can be done cheaper elsewhere. It means that from now on, we send our tax checks to Pakistan.

Oh, I can already hear the screeches of protest: “Don’t you realize how children are treated in the great accounting firms of Karachi? Haven’t you seen photos of their little fingers, swollen and bloody from countless hours at the calculator?”

Sadly, some isolated instances of abuse have hit the headlines. But what you don’t read about are the millions of 8-year-old bookkeepers spending 15 happy hours a day in air-conditioned comfort, glad they can bring home a dollar or two after an honest week’s work.

With county officials desperately seeking $5 million, can we afford not to have our tax checks tallied by bright, offshore juveniles? We might spend a bit more in postage, but the savings for Ventura County would be immense.

I can’t imagine why this simple measure has eluded our officials.

Maybe they didn’t quite get the fashionable management mantra: “Think out of the box!”

Maybe they heard it instead as: “Think outta bucks!”

In any event, the county’s problems can be solved easily with some true out-of-the-box thinking.

For instance, it seems that 11% of the county’s budgeted positions are permanently vacant. This practice allows department heads to find money for employee raises and other expenses by cutting “jobs” that never existed.

In some ways, the employment of phantoms would appear to be a sound management practice. For one thing, they never bellyache about the office being too cold. And workers with no earthly form do not require expensive, ergonomically-correct chairs.

Still, no Fortune 500 company would ever go for it. Bill Gates would never stand before his shareholders and tell them: “We’re No. 1! And I couldn’t have done it without my 100,000 associates, 78,000 of whom are invisible!” Statements like that would make investors nervous. Come to think of it, they should make taxpayers nervous too.

For Ventura County, there are only two choices. The supervisors can fire more than 500 ghost workers, bringing immeasurable grief to them and their families during the holiday season.

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Or, thinking out of the box, they can announce the opening of invisible parks, invisible libraries, invisible jails--all lovingly staffed by highly skilled phantoms. Invisible roads would be repaired and invisible care provided to the mentally ill. And all this would take place before the very eyes of astonished voters, who had been led to believe the county was in some kind of trouble.

There are many other daring initiatives the supervisors should consider.

They can be big players in the billion-dollar world of TV franchising.

How much would Fox pony up for the exclusive rights to every high-speed chase in Ventura County?

What would Court TV give if the Ventura County bench made room for . . . Judge Judy?

Imagine the huge bid from Steven Bochco for rights to a series based on county law enforcement’s current boast: “Safest County West of the Ohio River.”

Well, maybe that last idea is a bit farfetched, but it’s only a prologue to this one:

Maybe the supervisors should forego the salary increase they voted themselves last spring, even after the dimensions of their disastrous, $15-million mental health blunder had emerged. It wouldn’t do much for the county treasury, but it would help shore up the sagging confidence of the public and county employees.

How much more out of the box can you get?

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.