EDITORIALS

Our viewpoint: County was too lax in manager oversight

The Editorial Board

Wanda Greene in 2010.

There’s enough blame to go around in the Wanda Greene scandal.

Greene retired June 30 after 20 years as Buncombe County manager. Her annual salary was $247,110, but records show she made more than double that in half the time in 2017. For one thing, she was paid the rest of a retention incentive she gave herself. For another, she took advantage of a retirement benefit that gives out half a year's salary to eligible employees.

That’s right. She was paid both to retire and not to retire, even though she did retire. And that’s not all. In addition to $309,348 there, she received nearly $68,000 for unused paid leave and about $7,400 in longevity pay. Money in addition to her annual salary totaled $384,526. That brought her total compensation for six months to $508,081.

How did she manage all of this? Because no one was managing the manager. County commissioners had, or should have had, access to all the information. But they seem not to have been paying attention.

The idea behind the commission-manager form of government, a reform dating back about a century, is to take the politics out of public administration. Elected officials are supposed to hire a professional manager and then leave that manager alone to run the government.

By all accounts, Greene was an accomplished manager. County government apparently was operating smoothly and efficiently. That may explain why she was so free of oversight, but it doesn’t excuse it.

Someone should have asked if incentives were getting out of control after the commission approved first money to encourage early retirement and then, when that got out of control, more money to discourage early retirement.

Someone should have made sure the pay raises the commission approved last year went to lower-paid employees, as was reported at the time to be the purpose. In fact, 15 of the 123 workers rewarded made more than $100,000 a year and the average salary was more than $64,000. Among the 15 were Greene, her son and a sister.

Highly paid employees shared in Greene’s largesse. Retention incentives were paid to nine other employees earning at least $100,000 a year. Others received additional pay for additional duties, a practice the county has since discontinued.

Interestingly, one of the nine is Sheriff Van Duncan, an elected official. Duncan said Greene approached him about the program and that his decision to accept actually hurt him financially. “Now I think we all know that Wanda was just trying to include and give herself some cover to really boost her salary out the top,” Duncan said.

“I was disappointed to learn that pay increases were directed to the county’s higher paid employees rather than our lowest paid county workers,” county board Chair Brownie Newman said. “I was also disappointed that the media and the commission were provided inaccurate information on salaries and compensation for the county manager and senior staff."

Those are good words, but they must be followed up with good actions. Mandy Stone, who succeeded Greene as manager, must be subject to greater oversight than was her predecessor. This doesn’t mean every paper-clip purchase should be questioned. It means significant spending should be examined.

Also, information needs to be more available to the public. The Citizen-Times had to file public records requests to obtain the data upon which news stories and this editorial were based.

We don’t know whether Greene did anything illegal. Presumably that will determined by the federal investigation now under way. We do know some of her compensation  practices should have been questioned and weren’t.