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No offense to our good neighbors to the west.

But who's in charge in Winston-Salem anyway: the City Council or Dell?

If that seems a harsh assessment, you should have seen council members' abject eagerness to sing the computer maker's praises at Monday's long-awaited Finance Committee meeting in Winston.

Dell executives were supposed to be there to explain to the council and the public why they had been so reluctant to release employment figures that were critical to meeting state, county and city incentives guidelines.

I'm not sure they needed to come.

Council members seemed more than eager to speak for them.

"Thanks for being here and thanks for being one of the largest private employers in the county," Councilman Robert Clark said.

"I truly understand these difficult times."

As a businessman, Clark added, he sympathizes with Dell's plight in a challenging economy. "I wasn't sure the sun was coming up one day, much less the number of people I employ," he said. "I feel your pain."

Of course, Dell did say something on its own behalf, though not nearly as much as the packed room may have expected. Dell's vice president for operations in North America, Frank Miller, wouldn't even say, in plain English, how many employees the struggling computer maker had laid off at the Forsyth County plant. Dell employed 1,400 workers in January, he said. Now it employs 1,140.

You do the math.

Other than that, neither Miller nor the rest of the Dell contingent, which took nearly three rows of chairs in a small, second-floor room, said much else.

They made no commitments to keeping the Forsyth plant open long term. They could convert the plant from desktop production to more in-demand laptops. But they have no plans at this point to do that.

Most importantly, they made no firm commitments to be any more open to the public than they have been, despite the $280 million in incentives they negotiated with Winston-Salem, Forsyth County and the state in hardball discussions that demanded everything from free dry cleaning to free gas.

They will comply per their formal agreement with state and local governments to provide yearly figures. Nothing more, nothing less.

Also, a Dell official made a fairly unconvincing argument that Dell would not release employment figures for individual plants because it would reveal sensitive data to competitors. "They triangulate," he said.

A former Dell worker at the session was underwhelmed.

"I was under the impression there were going to be some hard-core facts and figures," Gloria Curtis said in an interview. "I was extremely disappointed."

Charles Humphrey, a retired federal worker, said near the end of the meeting: "I haven't heard anything to allay my fears."

Humphrey said he'd had frequent conversations with Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines about Dell. "You're not asking any questions," he said he's told Joines. "And you're not telling people what's going on."

To be fair, it's hard for a city council to talk tough to a big employer when good jobs are so hard to come by.

But Winston-Salem and Forsyth County have paid Dell a combined $22.2 million in incentives.

What's more, until Monday, Dell had stonewalled city leaders, the media and the public on the size of its workforce after three rounds of layoffs over the past seven months. And it had done so with no small degree of arrogance.

Two hundred eighty million ought to be worth an ounce or two of outrage from somebody around here.

But even reliably tough Winston Mayor Pro Tem Vivian Burke spoke softly. "I think we want to talk about the good things Dell has done," Burke said.

Every now and then, someone would gently hint that perhaps Dell could, you know, be a teeny bit more forthcoming.

"Perhaps the communication could be more frequent to your community partners," Finance Committee Chairwoman Wanda Merschel said, politely.

Ya think?

The session also dramatized the weaknesses in incentive negotiations on the state and local levels.

We are so eager to land employers that such important details as accountability and follow-up are given scant attention.

Make no mistake, Dell is a major catch for the state and the Triad. But that doesn't mean it is above accountability to taxpayers, who have feathered the company's nest with lavish tax breaks.

Computer sales may be down but Dell's smugness is not.