Government tends to procrastinate, though a continually better informed public drives them to action and at some point, what the public needs from government gets provided more efficiently and equitably, but it is always a balanced struggle.
An excerpt.
Daniel Weintraub: Audit says state unprepared for major emergency
By Daniel Weintraub - Bee Columnist Published 12:00 am PDT Thursday, September 21, 2006
No matter where they are on the political spectrum, just about everybody agrees that the first and most important role of government is to protect public safety. But a recent audit has concluded that the state government is falling short in one of its most fundamental tasks: planning and preparing for a natural disaster or a terrorist strike.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger should take note. Executives are often judged by how they and the people they direct respond in a crisis. If this review by the nonpartisan and respected Bureau of State Audits is correct, Schwarzenegger's administration risks being caught flat-footed when, inevitably, the next major emergency hits California.
A big part of the problem is with a slow-moving bureaucracy, the audit said. The state is dragging its feet in distributing federal money to local agencies and is behind schedule in reviewing emergency response plans for 35 of the 58 counties and 17 of 19 state agencies that would be asked to respond in a disaster.
In what sounds like an ominous echo from the Hurricane Katrina debacle in Louisiana last year, the state's organizational structure for disaster response, the audit said, is "neither streamlined nor well defined." The Office of Emergency Services and the separate Office of State Homeland Security have an "ambiguous relationship" and are not doing a very good job coordinating their missions within a "labyrinthine structure."
