It was a tough day at the office for a Staunton road crew. The News-Leader reports how workers on Wednesday accidentally placed a right-turn arrow at an intersection, creating an invisible dead end. (See photo at right.)To make matters worse, the direction would have drivers turn on the wrong way on a one-way street.
Luckily no one made the erroneous turn, and the arrow was quickly removed – but only after the city traffic engineer was forced to park his truck on the symbol and redirect traffic until road crews could come fix it.
The runner-up is Gov. Bob McDonnell. PolitiFact slapped Bob with his first Pants on Fire rating Thursday, after he claimed on CNBC on July 13 that Virginia is one of four states where state employees do not contribute to their pensions. “We pay the employee and employer share,” he said.
However, PolitiFact points out that not only is Bob wrong, but he himself signed two bills that codified state-employee contributions. Bob signed a bill in April of last year requiring newer workers to contribute 5%, and he signed a bill just two months ago requiring longer-serving workers to contribute 5%. Both laws have been in effect. Employees also get a 5% raise in the deal, but that doesn't change the fact that they now contribute to their pensions.
As PolitiFact put it, “The governor was hardly a stranger to this development.”
If there is anything Bob affixed his name to that you’d think he’d want to forget, it would be last year’s original Confederate History Month proclamation to promote tourism that sparked a firestorm for failing to mention slavery.
But today’s winner, actually topping a Pants on Fire rating, is the Norfolk Community Services Board. Turns out employee Jill McGlone was suspended in 1998 and never returned but mistakenly stayed on the payroll – for the next 12 years. She collected $320,000 in pay and benefits over that period, and McGlone has said she was assured she would be reinstated.
The scandal itself isn’t new, but a commonwealth’s attorney conceded Wednesday that even though a police investigation “does raise questions about prior management operations of the NCSB,” The Virginian-Pilot reports, there is not enough evidence for criminal charges. Why? “People just aren’t talking,” a city councilman said. In fact, the FBI has also been investigating the NCSB.
The NCSB, a quasi-government agency charged by the city with aiding the poor with an annual budget of $24 million, isn’t in the clear yet. Three former employees forced out over the scandal are suing the board and its chief for defamation, and more information will likely be revealed in a civil suit.
But it gets worse for the board. Not only has the NCSB been probed by federal and local law enforcement, inexplicably gave 320 grand to an axed employee, and is facing a lawsuit, but now the Pilot reports that the City Council is thinking of stripping the NCSB’s independence and putting it under more city control. All of this because, as a former board administrator put it, something “got lost in the administrative shuffle.”
That’s the Norfolk Community Services Board (“Hey, why is this dead guy on the payroll?”), today’s Worst Virginian in the World!
