Posted: Monday, 04 May 2009 10:00AM
We're Being Taken For A Ride
Steve Corbett Reporting
Monday, May 04, 2009
“Bob Reilly, please,” I said this morning at 9:29 when the nice woman at the Wilkes-Barre car lot answered the phone.
“He’s not in,” she said. “May I take your name and number and have him call you back?”
“When’s he coming in?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said.
Neither am I.
And that’s the problem.
I called the lot last Friday morning at 10:26 and asked if they had any nice Caddies for sale.
The nice woman connected me with the nice salesman whose name and picture appear on the car dealership Web site.
“Bob Reilly,” he said, ready to please.
The problem is that taxpayers in Luzerne County want him to please them by working at the full-time job that voters elected him to do as the county clerk of courts. People expect him to be on the job during courthouse hours of operation.
That really is not too much to ask.
But Reilly wasn’t at his desk in the courthouse doing the people’s business on a busy end of the week workday. Instead he was hustling car sales so he might profit and make more money than most of his constituents.
Reilly promised to call “Corbett” at 5:05 on Friday afternoon so we could talk about whether he was ripping off the public trust.
He never called.
So not only is Reilly working elsewhere on taxpayer time but his word isn’t any good, either.
That’s not a good trait for a car salesman.
In the car business, success depends on trust.
So does good government.
The public trust is sacred and Reilly has violated the most important tenet in public service, where principles must matter more than personal profit.
Reilly knows how hard it is to run a county office. That’s supposedly why he filed a law suit against the county and publically demanded more workers to help him do what he was elected to do.
But he was probably selling cars at the same time.
Reilly also was selling the people a bill of goods.
On Friday’s show, one of Reilly’s cousins called to defend him, saying that Reilly was working the two jobs because he was putting his kids through college. Another cousin, Luzerne County Commissioner Greg Skrepenak, did not call the show, by the way.
Too many people in Northeastern Pennsylvania have to work more than one job to make ends meet.
And Reilly is entitled to do whatever he needs to do to maintain his family comfort zone.
But he must do it on his own time, not on ours.
Reilly can work nights and weekends at the car lot. But he must work days at the courthouse.
The people are entitled to have him on the scene to help in whatever way he can. The people are paying his salary and for his health benefits. He must be held to the same standard as the average county worker who must ask for permission for time off.
And, if Reilly works nights and weekends at the courthouse, he must prove that to us.
The county maintains a card check for people who must come into work after normal office hours. We need to see those records. We must document whether Reilly has put in extra hours when the people’s business is officially finished for the day.
Good public servants know that the people’s business never ends. True public service is more than a full-time job. And if Reilly doesn’t like the required workload, he can go sell cars around the clock.
Talk of honest services is much in the news these days. It’s time for elected row officers like Reilly to get off the merry-go-round and put in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.
If not, somebody better call the cops.
Because law enforcement never sleeps.
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