Macon's messed up. That will be $420,000, please.

Matt Barnwell here at the paper wrote a piece yesterday about a Carl Vinson Institute study done for the city of Macon.

Not included in Matt's story, but interesting, are the results of an August poll of 573 city residents, who were asked where they get their news about city government:

41 percent — Local Television
23 percent — The Telegraph
15 percent — Other newspaper(s)
6 percent — News sites on the Internet
5 percent — Radio
3 percent — City of Macon Web site
3 percent — City of Macon Television
2 percent — Word of mouth/neighbors
2 percent — Other
1 percent — Refused to answer

As for the rest of the study, here's the lede of Matt's story:

The city of Macon must develop a culture of accountability, invest more heavily in its employees, empower innovation, plan for the long term and review its relationship with Bibb County.

While there are about 200-pages of department-by-department reviews, when it comes to the broad strokes, I could have told you that for free.

In fact, anyone who's been halfway paying attention the last few years could have told you that for free. This study cost $420,000.

It's one thing to pay consultants to help you fine-tune things, or when you don't understand the problem. But when EVERYONE AND THEIR BROTHER KNOWS that:

- the city needs more revenue, or less spending
- the 15 member city council is meddles
- the city and the county don't get along very well
- the city's finance department has lacked accountability, which kind of goes hand in hand with A FEDERAL GRAND JURY INVESTIGATION OF THE DEPARTMENT under the previous administration

When all that is fairly obvious, you probably have some low-hanging fruit to work on without needing a $420,000 study to get into the minutiae.

Now, to be fair, I'm sure this was a good study. I have a friend from college at the Institute who worked on it, in fact.

And this wasn't city money. It was from a grant Mayor Robert Reichert got to help develop more efficient city government. Still, I question how much can be learned from any report of this type that you couldn't also get by reading The Telegraph the last few years and talking to a few city employees.