The Absolutely Mind-Boggling Incompetence of the Wharton Administration

No one can accuse me of being an AC supporter, but today's report of the internal audit of the grass cutting operations blew my mind. Wow, the corruption didn't shock me. It was the incompetence and total lack of awareness that did. A couple years ago I wrote about AC's administration and Code Enforcement. You can read it here. Code Enforcement was riddled with corruption causing declines in property values and increased costs in blight related services (police, fire, etc). The Administration didn't want to hear about the specifics of this corruption and how it was being done. Instead, it quietly pushed out senior management, did some minor reforms, then put AC's buddy in charge. Fast forward 3 years and the corruption amazingly got even worse. This is what happens when you don't have a clue how to run a bureaucracy tasked with a really important function like protecting your tax base. When you look at the numbers anyone with have a clue realizes Code Enforcement's mowing program is totally out of control and they got away with it for TWO YEARS! Here's the numbers. In FY2012, the lot mowings were 7,100. That's a bunch, bordering on the unbelievable. But get this, FY2013 they claimed 37,000 lots mowed and another 35,000 in FY2014. there are only about 340,000 parcels in all of Shelby County. Memphis has about 220,000 parcels and the city is about 330 square miles. To give you a better idea I made a map showing what 36,000 parcels looks like.

In Frasyer,I selected every parcel 2 acres or smaller. Those are all in red. There are only 13,729 parcels in Frayser under 2 acres and when you add them all together that is 6.4 square miles. That is 3,098 football fields. In green on the map are all the parcels of Raleigh under 2 acres. There are only 13,450 parcels that work out to be 6.6 square miles. So basically all of Frayser and Raleigh only add up to 27,000 parcels. But hey, maybe I'm being unfair. Frayser and Raleigh were old suburbs with larger parcels. Well, look at the pink parcels. These are all the parcels north of Summer/North Parkway and the northern half of Midtown along with Binghampton within the 240 loop. This is what 36,600 parcels under 2 acres look like. It is 11 square miles or 5,324 football fields! If you mowed everyday of spring, summer and fall, you would have to mow 19 football fields a day. Code Enforcement claimed they mowed the equivalent of this area for TWO STRAIGHT YEARS! Goddamn that is a lot of mowing. You would need an army of Forest Gumps to do that. $6.3 million is what was spent over those two years. If I was in the Mayor's office and Onzie gave me a report that said in the first half of fiscal year 2013 the city of Memphis mowed Frayser I would have said 1) You are out of your f-ing mind and 2) Shut the whole operation down. Who, with an ounce of common sense, says great job mowing 16% of the city and tripling our mowing budget. Go out there and do it again next year! Over 3 years, the City of Memphis spent $7.6 million supposedly mowing grass. It would have been more effective to drop 7.6 million one dollar bills from a helicopter for all the good it did you.