Local opinion: I was a blood-sucking leech (a public employee)

The lady stomped up to the counter. “Did you send this?” she asked. It was, indeed, a letter from the city advising her that chicken farming in a residential zone was not permitted.

She slammed a plastic bag down on the counter. Inside were a half-dozen bleeding chicken heads.

“Is that abated enough for you?” she demanded.

Bill was a local old-timer. He had been told that he could not extend his horse corral down into a public flood control channel. He stormed into city hall.

“You want me to kill my ponies?” he drunkenly asked me. “I’ve got my rifle in the car and I’ll go and get it right now!”

I could not have raced down the hall to the police department any quicker.

“Hold onto my belt,” the analyst screamed at me as he leaned out of a Los Angeles fire department helicopter to snap aerial photos of city property.

Ah, the joys of government employment.

Somewhere — perhaps on another planet — being a public servant is still viewed as an honorable profession. In the 1960s, those of us who chose to study government and administration believed we were serving the public good. After all, we had the Peace Corps, VISTA, NASA, Head Start — all these programs initiated by the government to improve lives here and around the world.

We learned and implemented budgets, personnel procedures, legal theory, traffic engineering, land use planning, law enforcement and a wide variety of leadership and management practices. We weren’t concerned with 401ks and IRAs since they didn’t even exist. My starting salary: $3.40 an hour.

Right now, public employees (aka The Deep State aka blood-sucking leeches) are emptying their desks, removing their diplomas and certificates from the walls, and packing up their decades of experience and institutional knowledge all in the name of “making government more efficient.”

Is this what we really want, or are we discarding millions of years of experience in deference to leaders — elected and otherwise — who never in their lives held publicly funded jobs?

[Lest I be castigated as “one of them,” I also spent 20 years owning my own business that contributed millions to the local economy. I returned to the public sector because I still believed in the notion that good people can do good works].

Who doesn’t want less taxes? Who doesn’t want fewer applications and permits? Who doesn’t want to stop downing a Xanax before heading off to City Hall?

By blithely removing public employees from their jobs, we lose the professionalism that was at the heart of the “progressive” movement of the early 20th century as championed by President Teddy Roosevelt, Wisconsin Senator Bob LaFollette and California governor (and presidential candidate) Hiram Johnson. We are returning to the era when public employees were selected based on their loyalty to a party or an individual, qualifications be damned.

Name an organization that doesn’t have slackers and hangers-on, individuals who take up square footage but don’t seem to actually do anything. There’s a reason that a once obscure movie, “Office Space,” still resonates today. No private company, no agency, no branch office is immune from workers who ought to be encouraged to seek employment elsewhere.

But as we show qualified professionals to the door, we should ask what we’re losing. Who patrols the streets, picks up the trash, repairs the highways, extends the water supply, jails criminals and, yes, counts the taxes? We once thought that public service was a modest and esteemed profession. Now, our brightest college graduates are streaming to business schools and hedge-fund companies. Is this what we wanted? Explain to me how a hedge-fund can fix your streetlight.

Whereas leeches were once thought of as disgusting creatures, we now find that they’re useful in medical treatments. Be careful about what you dispose of — today’s leeches could be in charge of repairing your streets or maintaining your national parks tomorrow unless, of course, you pick them off.