A "culture of dysfunction" at OC Public Works!

     Norberto Santana Jr. of the Voice of OC posted a blockbuster today:

Probe of OC Public Works Finds Culture of Dysfunction (Voice of OC, July 20, 2012)

     A long-awaited internal probe into Orange County Public Works department reveals a dysfunctional organization plagued with meddling from county supervisors’ offices and CEO Tom Mauk on contracts for influential contractors as well as on property improvements for select constituents.
     The report, obtained by Voice of OC, found that “past OC Public Works executive leadership has created cultures of favoritism, poor communication, organizational manipulation, and discrimination that have spawned low morale, distrust, and fear within OCPW.” (continued….)

Report finds culture of distrust at Bustamante’s former agency (OC Reg)

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "guns that are good for nothing"

In the Loop
~by Bob Hicok

I heard from people after the shootings. People
I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely
the same message: how horrible it was, how little
there was to say about how horrible it was.
People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed
because they know I teach at Virginia Tech,
to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually
I answered these messages: there’s nothing
to say back except of course there’s nothing
to say, thank you for your willingness

to say it. Because this was about nothing.
A boy who felt that he was nothing,
who erased and entered that erasure, and guns
that are good for nothing, and talk of guns
that is good for nothing, and spring
that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some,
and scotch for others, and “and” for me
in this poem, “and” that is good
for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise
go about going away, bereft of us and us
of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing
like a scarf left on a train. As if the train,
empty of everything but a scarf, still opens
its doors at every stop, because this
is what a train does, this is what a man does
with his hand on a lever, because otherwise,
why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over,
and then it had just begun.

*