Twice in one week I heard people discussing the role of the county administrator, namely, why one was needed and hired. Apparently Cook County functioned without an administrator, but it was decided that the board needed help organizing itself, reducing the number of outside studies needed for improvements, and generally having a foreman to oversee ongoing projects. It was argued in justification that such an administrator would actually save the county money.
Enter Jeff Cadwell, the antithesis of the hiring criteria.
Under Jeff’s guiding hand, the assessor, Todd Smith, sent everyone’s property taxes skyrocketing. Mr. Smith has had four years to get his final approval from the state of Minnesota and has failed, so the state told him to step down. When you’re paying out your hefty property taxes, don’t you feel entitled to have a bona fide assessor, at the very least?
Then we had the Keystone Study for wage and salary analysis. Sorry, but as a former wage and salary analyst, I have to point out that inappropriate comparable counties were used, so all the county salaries are skewed upward. Further, in the confusion of what to assign county employees for realistic health care compensation, Jeff urged the board to vote everyone on the county payroll HUGE raises including job longevity increases. When was the last time you got a raise for sticking to a job, particularly a highly desirable job? Incidentally, Mr. Cadwell upped his own salary from $85K to $116K.
How is it that the board went along with the 43 percent increase over three years this payroll represented, more than $1 million to our annual budget?
Presently we’re dealing with the Hovland garage debacle, something which could easily have been solved by asking the people who work there what items needed to be improved, and hiring local help to make the changes or, as one person suggested, ordering a Morton barn. But now we have a $1 million-plus garage in the works.
Mr. Cadwell has locked us into a maintenance agreement with the YMCA which is financially disadvantageous to Cook County.
As for the new jail, he pushed for the Wold study on a $5 million jail that two other reputable studies stated is completely unnecessary for Grand Marais given its prisoner count and extreme northern location within the state. Despite the modest improvements to the current jail which are necessary and probably would not amount to more than $500,000, the Committee of the Whole (without the sheriff present) is debating the feasibility of a $1 million improvement. Mr. Cadwell does nothing if not spend taxpayer money.
And he has more expensive projects up his sleeves according to his presentation to Ehlers entitled “Building Support for Capital Projects,” which should more accurately read: How to Manipulate the Public. Anyone reading this who believes the upcoming levy will be 5.99 percent will be in for a serious surprise.
It used to be a person could call Braidy Powers and get a clear answer as to what money was spent and where it went. Under Mr. Cadwell, even Braidy is unsure what is going where.
At the March 12 board of commissioners’ meeting, Arvis Thompson justifiably attacked both the proposed Kronos Payroll System as a fancy tech unnecessary addition of $50K per year to the budget AND the report on the Hovland garage containing unsubstantiated figures derived from unspecified funds, unattached funds, and dangling numbers all pointing to a logically unsubstantiated final cost figure.
The Wold study used old out-of-date statistics and omitted any figures on what it would cost to operate such a jail.
And now we come to the meat of the matter. These studies and figures for the astounding wage and salary increases, the Hovland garage, the YMCA, the new warming house, and the excessive Wold jail are always presented in a sketchy fashion. The public is hard-pressed to know where the funds are coming from and what the actual final figures will amount to. Mr. Cadwell keeps numbers deliberately vague, hard to track, or just plain incomplete.
Every week the county board picks up a “packet” with the agenda for the following week’s board meeting and any relevant materials on the topics to be covered. Everything they need to know is contained within the packet, that is, everything Mr. Cadwell wants them to know since he edits the packet for content, and sometimes he leaves things out until the actual meeting itself. Despite assurances from Heidi Doo-Kirk and Myron Bursheim that they possess backgrounds in finance, never do they contest or question the financials set before them: apparently only Arvis Thompson double-checks the math.
I can’t blame the county board for being completely enamored with the fact they pick up their meeting packets assembled by Mr. Cadwell, peruse the material selected and organized by Mr. Cadwell, and show up for the meetings without ever challenging anything they read. Mr. Cadwell has artfully steered and manipulated them into thinking the only things they need consider are all contained within the packets. Alas, he’s not giving them the full picture, and they are too trusting, or too busy, or too financially unskilled, to question him. They have become a Bobble Head board, nodding and agreeing to everything, never questioning anything, never saying no. It must have been embarrassing to attend the Town Forum on the jail and realize the general public knew more about the issue than they did.
Mr. Cadwell’s tenure here is the longest he’s been employed anywhere, so with a sketchy record like that, it behooves him to up his personal net worth as fast as possible. Accordingly he’s engineered a sizable salary raise from when he was hired four years ago, and he’s upped the financial profile of Cook County so it now appears he’s in charge of a bigger budget than when he came, by at least another million dollars. When he’s done strangling the taxpayers with his exorbitant spending, he’ll move on to a large county with a bigger budget, cite his expanded responsibilities here in Cook County, and re-feather his nest like he’s done (and is doing) here.
If you are weary of hearing about tax dollars flying out the window, sad at the increasing exodus of your friends and neighbors because they can no longer afford to live here, and flinching under the burden of your own tax bills, perhaps it’s time to call your commissioner and tell him/ her it would be good to release Administrator Cadwell from his compulsion to spend our money. When he was interviewed for hire he said his then position disagreed with his spending policies. Red flag. And jokingly, he mentioned that he always kept a suitcase packed and his truck gassed up.
Good.
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