Last evening, Nemski, Cassandra and I met with State Treasurer Velda Jones-Potter. I am sure my colleagues will offer their opinions of the meeting as well, but I wanted to offer my take. I was impressed with her, and also the simplicity of her message. LiberalGeek has met Chip Flowers and is impressed with him and his plan to remake the Treasurer’s office. It looks like the primary for the Democratic nomination features two able and bright candidates with two different visions of the office and what it can and should do.
I hope that is enough to occupy us and the candidate’s partisans without resorting to personal attacks upon each other, which as occurred in the past here and elsewhere whenever the Treasurer’s race has come up. But I digress.
In thinking about this race, I am reminded of a Simpsons episode where Homer Simpson is not impressed with the city garbage collection service, and challenges the City Sanitation Commissioner for election. Homer premises his campaign on the slogan, “Can’t someone else do it?,” and promises that the city sanitation workers will now wear uniforms, provide round-the-clock garbage service and do all the cleaning around the house.
Homer is elected in a landslide. And he proceeds to enact his campaign promises, but unfortunately spends his annual budget of $5 million, in one month. With no sanitation services now, the city is awash in garbage, and the entire city of Springfield has to relocate. The citizens of Springfield, seeing the error of their ways in electing Homer in the first place, beg the competent former Sanitation Officer to return, and he says “nuts to you, it’s your mess, you clean it up.”
State Treasurer Velda Jones-Potter is not looking to promise you the world in her campaign for election to office in her own right. She wants to modernize the office, make it more efficient, and eliminate redtape, but she is not looking to bring new responsibilities to the office, as the Treasurer has enough to do as it is. She touts her office’s work in maintaining Delaware’s Triple A Credit Rating, which results in low interest rates for when the state borrows money, one of only seven states in the U.S. to do so. She is proud of her work in getting vendors to agree to automatic deposit, which will save approximately $600,000.
She is also excited about a pilot program that is about to go state wide to all state agencies that will change the way revenue is collected by the state. In various state agencies, you have to pay a fee to access a service, like license renewals at the DMV, a fishing license at the DFW, etc. Normally, if those fees are paid by check or money order, there can a delay of service days or more in transferring the checks to the Treasurer’s office for deposit, meaning that often the checks are sitting around at the state agencies not collected interest for the state they could otherwise be receiving if they were already in a bank account. There is now handheld scanning devices that can scan the checks and deposit them into the state’s bank account immediately.
I asked her opinion of making these kinds of Row offices, like that of Auditor and Insurance Commissioner and Treasurer and Attorney General, appointed offices rather than elected so that politics is taken out of process, and she surprised me wanting to keep it the way it is. She believes it is right for row officers to be accountable to the people they serve, and also believes that by having each office elected separately, you enshrine checks and balances into the Executive Branch.
The sense you get from Mrs. Jones Potter when meeting with her is that she is proud to be a public servant and is only interested in doing her job, doing it well and better than before, and not doing someone elses’. She wants to educate the public about what her office does and citizens themselves can better manage money in their own lives. If her campaign is to have a slogan, I would suggest “competence over soundbites.” But that is just me.