SUPERVISORS SPEND $330K ON 'TEMPS' BECAUSE GOVERNMENT CAN'T HIRE

Your Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, bless their overstretched, under-achieving hearts, just rubber-stamped a whopping $330,720 contract with Robert Half Inc. for 'temporary employment services.' Apparently, the mighty County of Santa Barbara is now so incompetent at basic hiring that they need to outsource filling their own cubicles for a cool third of a million dollars over nine months. Who knew running a bureaucracy was such a Herculean task? One would think after decades of expanding the public payroll, they’d have at least one person capable of posting a job ad on LinkedIn.

The official line, as reported by the good folks at the SB County Board of Supervisors and their verbose agenda items, is that this expenditure serves the County's 'economic interests' by meeting 'immediate administrative staffing needs that arise suddenly and cannot be met through the County’s extra help hiring process.' 'Suddenly'? Are we talking about a surprise alien invasion or did someone just discover that, gasp, people occasionally retire or move on? The only thing 'sudden' here is the shock taxpayers feel seeing their hard-earned money frittered away because a perpetually expanding government can't even manage its own headcount.

And in a move that's become as predictable as sunrise, the geniuses in charge also declared that hiring half a million dollars worth of temporary staff has no 'physical impact on the environment' and thus requires no pesky CEQA review. Of course not! What's more environmentally sound than shuffling paper-pushers around and padding the pockets of a temp agency? It’s almost as if they think the act of spending money itself is somehow a magically carbon-neutral activity, unless, of course, that money is used to build something useful like, say, an oil well. Then, suddenly, the environmental impact becomes catastrophic.

This isn't about filling a few gaps; it's about a fundamental failure of local government to manage its own affairs. When a multi-million-dollar entity can't even hire its own employees without resorting to expensive third-party contracts, it's time to ask if we need fewer 'administrators' and more accountability. Perhaps next they'll contract out their decision-making process, because clearly, the current one needs an overhaul.