Thanks for Explaining, Harry

After reading the story in this morning’s Times-Dispatch about the high cost of running the City of Richmond, I was going to award CFO Harry Black a chutzpah award. http://www.inrich.com/content/cva/ric/news.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2008-02-17-0215.html In his article, TD reporter David Ress indicated that

[t]here's more City Hall administrative overhead spending per resident in Richmond than anywhere else in the state outside high-salary Northern Virginia and a couple of tiny localities.

In response, Harry Black stated “A lot of this stuff we inherited.” Since the Wilder Administration has been in office for more than three years I thought it took a lot of chutzpah for Harry to blame the mess at City Hall on prior administrations. One would think that three years would be sufficient time for Doug Wilder and Harry Black to eliminate all that waste in city government that existed when they took office.

But, dear reader, after I thought about Harry’s comment for a while, I realized that he really does not deserve the award. You see, he was not trying to redirect blame. What Harry Black clarified with his statement is that when candidate Doug Wilder promised that if elected mayor he would clean up the “cesspool” in city government, he didn’t necessarily mean he would do it in his first term.