The City Council is right to question what Baltimore Inspector General Hilton L. Green has been up to for the last two years. His office gets $500,000 a year to root out corruption, yet he's only filed one annual report, which boils down to finding a few thousand dollars worth of misappropriated funds. With those resources, anyone who can't find more than that in a city government that's spent $4 billion during that time must not be looking very hard.
Mr. Green says his office has tackled important issues not reflected by the statistics, among them allegations of cheating on Fire Department promotion exams and complaints about falsified parking tickets, and he has organized workshops on workplace violence for city employees. However, none of those are likely to save the city very much money, and moreover they seem only tangentially related to his office's main job of promoting efficiency and holding city officials accountable for waste, fraud and abuse.
At the same time, Mr. Green appears to have spent an inordinate amount of time second-guessing the FBI and city Police Department investigations into the 2005 shooting death of developer Robert Lee Clay, which was ultimately ruled a suicide by the state medical examiner. Family and friends of the victim disputed that verdict and suggested Mr. Clay had been murdered, though the medical examiner's office found no evidence of anyone else being present when he died.
Investigating homicides is not one of the inspector general's strong suits, however, and his office is woefully ill-equipped to take on such jobs. Also, because Mr. Green never reported any findings in the case, the public has no way of knowing whether his intervention was anything other than a complete waste of time. The local NAACP branch, which backed the probes into both Mr. Clay's death and the firefighters' dispute, says it's still not sure what, if anything, his efforts produced.
City Council President Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake doubts the city is getting its money's worth from the inspector general's office, and last week the council voted to cut $200,000 from Mr. Green's budget, which could shrink his five-member staff in half. Even if Mayor Sheila Dixon ends up vetoing those cuts, we hope Mr. Green takes the council's message to heart that it expects more for the taxapayers' dollar than it's been getting from him over the last two years. There's no doubt the city could use someone independent of the mayor to act as a watchdog over city officials, but so far Mr. Green doesn't seem to be getting the job done.
