Norfolk seems to be sinking in a quicksand of incompetence

It's official. Norfolk is sinking.

In more ways than one.

News reports have confirmed what anyone who's driven in Norfolk during a downpour already knew: This city is drowning.

It's not as bad as flood-prone places like New Orleans and Corpus Christi, but the rising water levels are scary.

A bigger concern than flooding is the swamp that seems to be growing around City Hall.

Here's a prediction: A miasma of municipal incompetence and cronyism will sink this once-great city faster than anything Mother Nature doles out.

Let's recap just one week's worth of outrages.

Last weekend we learned about the astonishingly poor judgment of Barbara Lai. She was selected by City Manager Regina V.K. Williams to head a gang-fighting city department two years ago. Last December, Lai used a city credit card to buy a $250 cell phone for a suspected gang member. The next day that punk allegedly used the taxpayer-funded smartphone during an abduction.

Naturally, Lai lost her position, but not her salary. This is Norfolk, after all. She's now an assistant to the city manager and continues to earn $107,000.

On Thursday, The Pilot reported that Norfolk's Community Services Board kept an employee on its payroll for a dozen years even though the "worker" never showed up for work.

On Friday, the city attorney named the phantom who was reportedly fired recently. She's Jill McGlone. The public still hasn't been told what McGlone's salary was or the value of her benefits.

There's more, of course. A still-unnamed Community Services Board supervisor is under investigation for allegedly aiding the no-show.

With news dribbling out about this astonishing situation, there's so much to anticipate. The release of McGlone's annual job appraisals, for instance. That should be delightful reading for fans of fiction.

Wait, we're not done.

On Friday Norfolk's embattled commissioner of the revenue - who ran up thousands of dollars worth of charges on a city credit card while wining and dining state legislators in Richmond - was back in the news.

Seems Sharon McDonald, a state constitutional officer whose office is supplemented with city funds, hired her own daughters as summer employees. To be fair, it does appear that the McDonald girls actually went to work.

Apparently the commissioner missed the memo that said the best way to get around charges of nepotism in Norfolk is to have your relatives work in other departments, not your own.

McDonald fired back with a list of about two dozen city employees who seem to be part of a loose, you-hire-mine-I'll-hire-yours arrangement. Among those employed in public jobs were the city manager's son, who works in the law library at the jail, and former City Council member Randy Wright's son, who toils in the city treasurer's office.

Stop it. All of you.

The city of Norfolk is not a family firm. If you've been elected or appointed to a high office, your sons, daughters, husbands, wives, nieces and nephews should find work elsewhere.

If the City Council doesn't act quickly to abolish waste, lackadaisical mismanagement and a troubling tolerance of poor performance, Norfolk will sink, all right.

Under the weight of its own arrogance.

Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net