One of the most popular items I send out to my constituents and others interested in our government, second only to my Battin NewsNet, is a feature we call Waste Watch. With the help of our very capable, stellar and outstanding Republican Senate Staff (I’m sucking up here – because they deserve it), we usually send it out weekly to all our subscribers.
It’s name says it all – its a real life report on how consistently our government at all levels is almost criminally wasteful with taxpayer dollars. It will make you laugh – and make you cry – It’s my favorite feature and we receive tremendous feedback. I’ve decided to post it regularly here on the FlashReport.
Here’s our latest installment (you can get back issues here at the bottom of the page):
Just when you thought you’ve heard the ultimate story on mindless, wasteful spending, a story like this takes your breath away. The Los Angeles Housing Department decided to defy thousands of years of human behavior and pay someone, with taxpayers’ money, to teach its employees to breathe. Did these people really need to learn how to breathe? After all, you have to be a living, breathing person to hold a job in the first place, right?
According to the Los Angeles Times (May 11, 2007), “a Zen Buddhist priest from Hawaii…has been paid $18,819 since 2005 to conduct at least four training sessions for executives and other staff…[in] management training that includes teaching breathing using sphincter control, learning ‘how to stand’ and playing with wooden sticks.”
The general manager of the department sees the deep breathing as a way to “‘center’ Housing Department managers and teach them to react nimbly to problems such as the city’s housing shortage.” Not all employees found it to be as “centering” as intended.
One employee, who left the department in 2005, “was put off by the presumption that she and her colleagues ‘had to be taught how to breathe and how to stand.’” She said that most of the training sessions “took place in a conference room,” but added, “(a)t one point we went out to the parking lot to wield our swords.” As a reminder, this department “helps build affordable housing, enforce rent control laws and ensure apartments are up to code.” You do need to breathe to do your job, but logic says that brandishing swords is not integral to this department’s work.
Another employee who attended the training reflected on a puzzling part of the training: “Executives were asked to encircle (their boss) with their backs to her while holding their sticks [and] were instructed to imagine that they were shielding their boss from opposing forces such as City Council members or other departments.” Continuing the description, a former senior manager described another useless exercise: “The leader gives the initial command, so everyone waves sticks in rhythm.”
During the next training, some employees will wave their sticks in praise of the City Council (that is for those who want more nonsensical, choreographed breathing with sticks). They may have warded off the “opposing forces” of the City Council in the previous trainings because “last year, the City Council unanimously approved another contract for up to $15,000” of more breathing instruction.
The absurd past training, combined with the predictably more bizarre future training, will cost LA taxpayers approximately $33,819. Perhaps, this careless use of taxpayer money could have been prevented if one of the wooden sticks had been used to knock some sense into the LA City Council.