Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 7, 1993 TAG: 9301070433
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Staff
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
POST-SCHLANGER
KEEPING logs of long-distance phone calls charged to the city is apparently a minor hassle that Roanoke municipal employees will have to get used to.Most departments already do so in one form or another, but City Auditor Bob Bird's plan is to set up a system that's uniform and universal.
The impetus, of course, is former Finance Director Joel Schlanger's use of city phones for personal business - a practice that led apparently to insufficient candor when he was asked about it by City Council, which in turn led to Schlanger's resignation under pressure.
There's a certain unfairness to it. Schlanger was a top administrator, hired directly by council. Nobody has accused rank-and-file employees under City Manager Bob Herbert's command of violating the policy of charging long-distance calls to the city only when it's city business. Yet it is they who must undergo the inconvenience.
But there is also a certain reason behind it, just as there was cause to spend far more on auditing Schlanger's records than the few hundred bucks he ended up owing the city.
At bottom, the Schlanger flap was less about money than about principle. If the finance director could unilaterally make himself exempt from a city rule that applied to everyone else, why shouldn't every other city worker be able to do so?
And if everybody could charge their personal long-distance calls to the taxpayers, you're starting to talk real money . . . for a perk that is nowhere listed as a condition of municipal employment.
Still, the goal should be to keep phone logging and auditing from becoming too burdensome and expensive a proposition.
In this instance, it will be too expensive if the cost of the logging and auditing is greater than the cost of the policy violations deterred.