The problem isn’t council members

What should a reasonable resident in La Marque make of the announcement that the Volunteer Fire Department is disbanding?

It’s not a tragedy.

The city has fire protection — or it certainly ought to. A generous chunk of the city budget — almost $2 million — goes the fire department.

In a perfect world, it’d make sense to have volunteers to supplement the work of paid firefighters.

But such a force would have to be more than public-spirited and well intentioned. It would, for example, have to be organized and disciplined enough to submit regular, coherent financial statements to the city to account for activities involving public money and public resources.

That’s a reasonable expectation. And city officials aren’t being mean in suggesting it is an expectation that’s not negotiable.

Maybe keeping good records shouldn’t be the responsibility of the volunteers. Maybe that should be a responsibility of those in the regular department who supervise them. But it’s obvious that no one was taking that responsibility seriously.

A few months ago, Larry Mann, a member of the city council, made a couple of points about the city’s priorities and asked an excellent question.

First, he observed that the lion’s share of La Marque’s budget goes to salaries, which is one reason the city has trouble keeping its infrastructure in working order.

Second, he observed that the fire department, in particular, was getting a large part of the city’s resources, especially for a small city.

His question: What are we getting for our money?

Is the service it’s getting so much better than that in surrounding cities? Is such a large investment, relative to the city’s size, really justified?

In La Marque, three council members — Mann, Deanie Barrett and Connie Trube — are being subjected to recall, largely because they’ve asked questions about basic accountability.

The more questions they’ve asked, the more it’s become obvious that the city is paying some people to do very little. Some people don’t want that to change and are working overtime to get rid of these three.

The people who are asking for accountability deserve support in trying to clean up this mess.