In March, Custer School’s superintendent announced he would retire. This week the school board rehired him. What this means is the guy will draw his retirement out of the South Dakota Retirement system while the taxpayers of South Dakota continue to pay his already exorbitant salary of $91,000 and then some. What the hell is that board thinking?

Within the last year or so, the Black Hills Playhouse board of directors fired its director of decades. Controversy ensued. The usual things were said. People still don’t believe they really know what happened. This spring, the state has been kicking around the idea of not renewing the Playhouse’s lease in Custer State Park. They site the lack of a good business plan on the part of the new management as the main reason. The board and management claim that things are fine. Donations and ticket sales are up for the coming season, they say. Public sentiment seems to be mixed. There are those who are convinced that the theater’s hard times link directly back to the board’s firing of the long time director. I can’t say if this is true or not, I only know what they say about assuming.

The Black Hills Humane Society ran through four executive directors in the last year or so. Four executive directors! Come on. You don’t have to have a degree in public administration to know that something is fishy with a board of directors when they hire and lose four directors in less than a year. Nobody knows what the essence of the problem is, of course, because any questions from the media and public are met with some sunny almost nonsensical statement about how the board’s main consideration is the animals and that they plan to continue to do a great job of taking care of them. So, the public is left to speculate and we all know where that gets us.

Sometimes I think that public boards in South Dakota don’t know the difference between being a public board and being a public nuisance. This becomes a problem because while a public nuisance is generally self-funded, public boards are using our money (whether they get it in the form of donations, government contracts or payment for services rendered). Because, in one way or another, we pay for the activities directed by these boards, we have a stake in them.

We also usually care about the work or service the organizations ruled by these boards provide in our community. So, some of us at least are paying attention. The press goes to meetings and reports. The public goes to meetings and responds. Then all too frequently the board in question does something that makes no sense to anybody. Further, they won’t explain in any kind of fashion that makes their reasoning clear.

Public boards need to start being far more open and honest about what they are doing and why they are doing it. When the public sees a board doing something that seems intuitively wrong – running through executive directors like water, firing managers who appear to being doing a great job, not firing managers who have clearly screwed up – they need to be able to effectively explain why they made the decisions they did to the public they serve. If they don’t we are left to assume and speculate. When we begin to assume and speculate, we the public think they are lying or, at the very least, not telling all the truth. When we think these boards are lying, we learn not to trust them. When the public doesn’t trust its board, they are rendered ineffective and no longer serve the purpose for which they were elected.

There is probably not much the public can do to control these boards in South Dakota. Those in charge are those in charge, if you know what I mean. But, it does seem that these are the people who come asking us for money quite frequently. Maybe it is time for the money to dry up for these boards. I am a firm believer that money talks and no organization that can’t make sense gets my contribution. Of course, the school board is a different animal. Anyone out there know what to do about that?