COLUMN: A logo fiasco

But it’s not just chump change you find lying around on the ground, either. To put it in perspective, $4,000 is what the board of commissioners collect off of property taxes from about six average-priced houses in Jackson County.

Monday night, six lucky homeowners had their property taxes pay for a new Jackson County logo.

That’s right, a logo.

Four words and two squiggly lines.

For the math-impaired, that’s $1,000 per word.

This column is about 760 words.

Damn. I’m vastly under paid.

For no extra charge, BOC members were told if they “squint” their eyes, the two squiggly lines look like a “J” and a “C”.

Great. A logo you have to squint to understand. Can I just take off my glasses instead?

It’s not clear what bureaucrat cooked up this bone-headed idea. Doesn’t really matter because three bone-headed county commissioners voted to approve it.

I’m sure there’s some kind of serious-sounding story behind creating this claptrap. I’d bet some fancy-sounding words like “marketing,” “presentation,” “image” and “branding” would be used to explain how important that $4,000 was to spend.

I have a couple of serious-sounding words about it as well, but they can’t be printed here.

Let’s settle for “dumb.”

The county is bleeding money. Revenues are tanking as the economy reels from the worst economic crisis in 75 years. The housing boom that drove Jackson County’s income over the last eight years is dead. Kaput. Nada.

Unemployment is climbing. The county government is in the middle of several huge construction projects that are costing millions of dollars and that will create a much higher overhead in the coming years. This same BOC is talking about some serious cutbacks.

Yet, in the middle of all this, our county leaders think it’s just fine to spend four grand on a logo?

It’s a textbook case of what’s wrong with government at all levels. Bonehead bureaucrats don’t give a whit about the citizens they’re supposed to serve. They’ve lost touch because they believe they don’t answer to anyone.

The blame for much of this can be put on the 30-year trend to “professionalize” government administration. Thinking that our local governments would be better managed if we got the elected politicians out of the way and put in “professional” administrators and managers, we all bought into the idea that a “professional” government would solve our problems.

But we just swapped one set of problems for another set. Now we have governments dominated by “professionals” whose sole focus is on their own careers. They endlessly promote themselves and seek to grow the size of the governments they run. Bigger is better in their eyes. More money. More employees. More power.

Even worse, elected officials too often cower to the managers they hire. Boards and councils no longer provide oversight; they’ve become just a rubber stamp for inane staff ideas.

That’s why we have money being thrown away in the middle of an economic crisis on a logo.

It’s not the amount of money involved; it’s the nonsense behind it.

Does Jackson County really need a new logo? How will that help better the lives of Jackson County citizens? Will it pay for the new jail? Will it stem the flow of foreclosures? Will it provide jobs for the unemployed? Will it bring in more sales tax dollars?

Look, Jackson County has been one of the most successful counties in the state in the past decade at growing its business base. That wasn’t the result of a logo. The county hasn’t lost a single business or a single job because someone thought our logo was bad.

This week’s logo fiasco was a solution in search of a problem. It was driven by someone’s bureaucratic ego, not by any real need.
And at $1,000 per word plus two squiggly lines, it was an outrageous price to pay for a 30-minute typesetter. A high school graphics class could have done the same thing for free.

OK, BOC, where do I mail you my bill? This 760-word column is full of words of wisdom. At $1,000 per word, I’d say you owe $760,000 for my efforts.

And if you squint your eyes, BOC, maybe you’ll be able read the letters “BS” a little more clearly with the next dumb idea you vote on.

Mike Buffington is editor of The Jackson Herald. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.