A $160 million contract for electric school buses so flawed that when the contractor delivered broken buses, the Montgomery County school system spent millions more on standard diesel buses to get kids to school.

Job conditions for Baltimore public works employees so inhumane that there was no water for work crews on hot days and no toilet paper in workplace bathrooms. A sanitation worker died.

A Baltimore County Council member so clueless, she moved out of her district without realizing that would break the terms of the county charter.

Cheating on pay records. Running a business out of a county office. Using county vehicles for election campaigning.

Inspectors general in Baltimore and Montgomery counties and Baltimore City exposed all these things, responding to hotline tips and saving taxpayers millions.

“We are the people’s watchdog,” said Isabel Mercedes Cumming, the Baltimore inspector general. “And that is why independence is such an important pillar of having an effective inspector general, because the worst thing you can have is someone calling themselves an inspector general that works within the system.”

As a power grab over the Office of the Inspector General in Baltimore County shows, maintaining independence can be a constant struggle. That doesn’t explain, though, why there aren’t more inspectors general.

“I say all the time, oversight is very hard,” said Megan Davey Limarzi, the Montgomery County inspector general. “It is hard work for everyone involved. No one likes to be told what they’re doing wrong. No one likes to be called out.”

Clearly.

Baltimore County Executive Kathy Klausmeier last week moved to push out her county’s inspector general, wresting control just four years after the job was created by replacing Kelly Madigan with a former fed with limited experience.

In Anne Arundel County, voters expanded the investigation powers of the county auditor in November to be roughly equivalent to an IG. But they left the appointment in the hands of elected officials who could one day be investigated.

Both decisions are examples of the conflict of interest possible when inspectors general aren’t truly independent.

“That’s not best practices, and that’s not the way that it’s usually set up,” Cumming said.

Independence has been the fight from the start, when Montgomery County approved Maryland’s first local inspector general in 1997.

Then-County Executive Doug Duncan vetoed the idea, citing concerns about an independent agency in his office. The County Council overrode him and agreed to appoint the IG from names forwarded by an independent panel. A later attempt to move the office under the executive fizzled.

When then-Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley created an IG’s office eight years later, he put the job in the city solicitor’s office as an appointment. Mayors started firing inspectors general almost immediately.

By the time the City Council remade the office as an independent agency in 2018, the job had been vacant for two years. The council picked Cumming from names forwarded by an advisory board, and in November made her the first city inspector general ever reappointed.

“We got 70 complaints a year when we got in,” she said. “We found $240,000 that we identified as waste, fraud and abuse. Last year, we had 900 complaints and we identified $17 million. That’s the growth in seven years.”

Howard County voters approved an inspector general in November, but the legislation approved by the County Council in December passed only after bickering over who would appoint the inspector and who could get the job.

Prince George’s County has an IG who focuses only on police. Charles County voters rejected a change in government that would have created an IG’s office.

Anne Arundel is going its own way. Voters in November gave the auditor, a job previously focused on financial compliance, the power to investigate. Not independence.

Council Chair Julie Hummer said the council will hire the new auditor later this year — despite the lessons of Baltimore and now Baltimore County.

“That’s not where we are as a county,” said Hummer, a Democrat.

State Sen. Clarence Lam sees the difference. He represents both Howard and Anne Arundel, and submitted legislation in Annapolis this year that would have forced Anne Arundel to follow Howard’s example.

Under council rules, there’s no protection for an auditor who finds a council conflict of interest.

“There’s no firewall at all if the council decides we don’t like what you’re looking into, that this is getting too close to me,” Lam said. “They’ll put them up for a vote and fire them.”

County Executive Steuart Pittman blocked the bill. His lobbyist told the Senate that changes to the auditor were sufficient, the costs of an IG too high and, in polite terms, it’s not the senator’s business.

Howard County’s new IG’s office will have a $2.4 million budget. Baltimore’s gets $2 million a year. Montgomery County’s office costs $3 million — and it’s the only one with the power to examine schools.

State lawmakers added the change in 2020, although the Maryland State Department of Education has an inspector general. Boy, did they hit pay dirt.

“That’s where probably some of our bigger impactful things have occurred,” Limarzi said.

Investigators not only validated complaints that a Montgomery County middle school principal was harassing female teachers, but found the school system violated its contract rules by spending $210,000 on a crisis communications consultant.

In May, Limarzi’s team revealed that the system couldn’t find all of its 200,000 Chrome notebooks, jeopardizing a $19 million investment in getting students online.

Not all waste and abuse is criminal. Some of it is unintended or the result of a bureaucracy that loses sight of its purpose.

Inspectors general are there to hold them all accountable, to course correct and to expose the cheats and charlatans.

You have to wonder why there aren’t more of them, and why we don’t do more to ensure their independence.

“You know,” Cumming said, “some people do actually want to game the system.”