After eight years in Columbia city management, one as an assistant and seven as Columbia's city manager, former Columbia Police Chief Charles Austin must move on. His last day on the job is March 31 when he collects his last pay check, part of an annual take of more than $160,000, plus an unreported expense package and retirement plan.

Austin's formal education was in criminal justice and religion, tools suitable for police work and running a church.

A national search to replace Austin has begun. Mayor Coble has been quoted as saying the city needs a city manager with a strong financial background and a proven management record. Maybe a graduate degree in management, such as an MBA or an MPA, should be advertised as part of the minimum criteria.

As police chief, beginning in 1990, Austin built a reputation as a favorable front for the city, a spokesman for when the citizens needed to hear what was going on.

With me, Austin the city manager and Austin the police chief had two selfinflicting faults. One, he apparently never got through accounting. The other - and this is personal - was my distance from him in matters of tolerance, spirit, and city life.

In his zeal to keep the streets clean and quiet and safe, Austin somehow interfered with the natural development of city streets in becoming occupied at all hours, part of a living city. Main Street in downtown Columbia reflects a preference for clean and quiet and safe streets.

Soon after taking control of the Columbia Police Department, Austin voiced his objections to Halloween in Five Points. Young people were coming to Columbia from all over the region, kind of like Savannah's St. Patrick's Day drew revelers from Atlanta and Jacksonville.

On Halloween night Five Points was mobbed with happy hedonists intent on making fools out of themselves. Intentions were openly manifest in their racy costumes and their risque body language, all altered and accentuated with alcohol.

For Austin, it was too much, and for Columbia City Council, it was plain awful. The kids were simply having way too much fun.

After Halloween was outlawed, so was walking down Greene Street with beer in hand to visit a neighbor or to buy a second at Goatfeathers.

At 58, Rev. Austin still has time to save Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, Venice, and Pamplona, wherever the kids are having too much fun.

What's not fun, on the other hand, is financial accounting. That's all business.

In running a $100 million business - and that's about the size of the city's collections - annual accounting conclusions and continuing full public disclosure of financial standing are imperative. A city the size of Columbia, the state's capital city, needs to be run by people who have run comparable cities and who have managed comparable businesses.

Inside South Carolina, Columbia is big, all right. But scale is no excuse.

The really big companies, the shareholder- owned names on the Big Board at the New York Stock Exchange, all get their annual reports together for the Securities Exchange Commission, which is a hard numbers crunch called the 10K, and it's boiled down to three documents: (1) balance sheet, (2) statement of cash flows, (3) income statement. Then, everyone who asks can get a quick and honest answer to the question, "How did we do?"

The fiscal year and the calendar year with these big outfits are the same, so annual meetings of shareholders generally occur in the spring, giving the bean counters and top floor executives enough time after New Year's Eve to take the 10K and put it with enough embellishment to make just about any management team look good.

Now, this annual event, this full crunch and disclosure is done every year with every publicly owned company, regardless of size, and many times we're talking billions of dollars. And it's done on time, every time.

Compared with that crowd, the big boys on the Big Board, Columbia is small and manageable.

So how is it the citizens of Columbia still can't get a full accounting of fiscal year 2007- 2008 and ask "How did we do?" And how long was it before the report on fiscal year 2006- 2007 began to surface? Before that, my copy of "The Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, City of Columbia, South Carolina, Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2006," was given to me with a transmittal letter to Mayor Coble dated "November 28, 2007," 17 months after the end of the fiscal year.

Enough. Columbia City Council had no choice.