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Hernando Today

County Administrator Puts The Screws To Lousy Department Heads

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By JOHN HERBERT, From Where I Sit

Hernando Today

Published: September 3, 2008

Updated: 09/03/2008 04:28 pm

David Hamilton for president! That might be overreacting a bit, but he's already collected three scalps as he continues to plow through the county's murky and expensive business dealings.
The Hernando County administrator, Hamilton recently suspended our public works director, Charles Mixson, for 10 working days. At last, I've seen a rap across the knuckles for the guy who made life miserable for me, lots of other motorists and area store owners during the drawn-out reconstruction of the intersection of Mariner and Spring Hill Drive.
What Hamilton cited Mixson for, though, were several other long-running county soap operas like channel dredging at Hernando Beach and the painful clean-up of the allegedly contaminated DPW property in Brooksville.
I don't live near either site, but I'm pretty tired of hearing and reading all about their trials and tribulations for the better part of this young century.
Hamilton was wrong, however, on one aspect of his severe written admonition of Mixson. Hamilton wrote: "It is a basic management principle that while a supervisor can delegate authority, he cannot delegate responsibility."
That's not exactly correct. A top manager may have an overall responsibility to get things done and to provide the training and tools to do the job, but since decisions should be made at the point of authority or action, responsibility should be delegated there as well.
My point is that all responsibility doesn't have to be delegated way up on the organizational chart. One public works bottleneck is that Mixson may have known too much. The people under him probably gave him all the up-to-date reports he needed and then sat back and waited for the decision from the top that was way too long in coming.
It may be that Mixson is the finest engineer in the county. He may even know everything, but that doesn't automatically qualify him to make all the biggest decisions himself. Could it be that the "Peter Principle" of promoting people above their levels of competence has struck again?
I'm not even sure that all of the decisions Mixson was expected to make ever really came across his desk. Maybe he got too bogged down in decision-making details that all the right things were never done. For a guy drawing $124,000 of the county's overall resources, that's a staggering waste.
Bear in mind that a manager today usually has to juggle human resources, finances, production and technology. In fact, all he or she has to do is create the appropriate atmosphere rather decide everything at the very top.
What Mixson still has to recognize is that he's not at the top for the glory and the power, but to demonstrate results. As Hamilton noted, "There's a lot more to management than a big office and a large salary."
Mixson isn't totally responsible for the alleged sorry state of public works, of course. The county commission deserves some finger-pointing, too, for allowing a cockeyed situation to fester. It hasn't helped, either, that the county administrator position has been pretty much of a revolving door in recent years.

A regular columnist for Hernando Today, John Herbert lives in Spring Hill.

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