
                         THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
                 Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, June 4, 1994                    TAG: 9406040010 
SECTION: FRONT                     PAGE: A8    EDITION: FINAL  
SOURCE: Medium 
DATELINE: 940604                                 LENGTH:

CHESAPEAKE CITY GARAGE REPAIRED: LESSONS WORTH LEARNING

{LEAD} Just two years ago, Chesapeake's City Garage was mismanaged and worse. Repairs to city vehicles were made slowly and at exorbitant cost. One employee has since admitted to fraudulent billing practices. Even when corruption wasn't a problem, cronyism was. Competitive bidding was not aggressively practiced.

As reporter Esther Diskin has chronicled, however, under the reforms of garage manager Vernon Lee Whitehurst Jr., things have gone from bad to substantially better. Recruited from the private sector to clean up the mess, Whitehurst has installed the sound business practices that were missing.

{REST} Competitive bidding is now the order of the day. Mechanics get more training. Inventory has been reduced and computerized. More mechanics have been hired to cope with increased demand, but overtime has been largely eliminated.

Whitehurst permitted employees to participate in management decisions rather than simple dictating from above. Morale, not surprisingly, improved. So did efficiency. Now more work gets done in less time at less cost. The backlog of vehicles awaiting repairs has also been cut dramatically. Most jobs are turned around in a day.

There are lessons in this tale that extend well beyond one city garage. If sound business methods are good for the public sector to adopt, privatizing functions is often even better. It's sometimes protested by opponents of the idea that privatizing runs the risk of replacing a public monopoly with a private one.

That can happen, but it doesn't have to. If the providers of privatized services have to rebid on a regular basis to retain the franchise, they are kept honest and competitors are encouraged. If properly handled, the efficient provider wins the business, the government gets out of businesses where it has no expertise and taxpayers get a lower bill to pay. by CNB