Presidential Chief of Staff designate, Rahm Emanuel recently responded to comments about the new president coming in during tough economic times. He said that difficult times present opportunities for change we might not get otherwise. Is that making lemonade out of lemons? It’s a great suggestion public officials should consider at every level of government.
Now is a good time to rethink how we commit to spend public funds. Tight budgets force us to slash our workforce. As we adjust to the loss of public employees, the prudent thing would be to evaluate the work being done by all our public employees. If we look at both productivity and processes we can determine whether we can permanently adjust to a smaller government.
Salaries with benefits for employees is very large component in the growth of government. Even if we have a “no growth” stable workforce, the cost of government goes up based upon the ‘cost of living’ index plus whatever extra is built into negotiated labor contracts. If the number of workers goes up, the cost increases compound. Our goal should be to keep the actual number of employees low and make sure we can afford down-the-line impacts of labor contracts we approve today. If revenue growth is not keeping pace with the cost of indexed commitments, we are falling further behind.
Hiring new public employees should only happen when we are absolutely sure there is adequate sustainable revenue to pay for them. Hiring and laying off employees is poor usage of public resources and unfair to employees and their families.
How often have you been to any government office where you could see employees in their work environment and you wondered what work they were hired to do? Sometimes you see staff just wandering around. I don’t want to characterize all government workers as slackers, but we have set low productivity expectations for many of them so it takes more of them to get a job done.
Competitive wages and benefits should produce high quality productivity. There have been occasions where private sector contractors were allowed to bid on government work and government managers had to bid to keep the work. If government managers operated like a business and were forced to produce a competitive product, we might get more efficient government for our tax dollar.
Elected officials are responsible for fairly managing the resources of government, balancing the needs of the taxpayers with the needs of public employees. If either one gets out of whack, the operation breaks down.
If all we do during this down-turn is wait for the economy to turn and get back to business as usual without adopting any meaningful change we will have lost a great opportunity. Let’s see what happens with our local favorites and decide whether they should stay or go.
Posted on December 17, 2008 at 3:35 pm in Partisan Politics, Political commentary, Snohomish County Council, Snohomish County Political Commentary, Uncategorized | RSS feed
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No Loss for Words
Less is More!
by Steve DanaPresidential Chief of Staff designate, Rahm Emanuel recently responded to comments about the new president coming in during tough economic times. He said that difficult times present opportunities for change we might not get otherwise. Is that making lemonade out of lemons? It’s a great suggestion public officials should consider at every level of government.
Now is a good time to rethink how we commit to spend public funds. Tight budgets force us to slash our workforce. As we adjust to the loss of public employees, the prudent thing would be to evaluate the work being done by all our public employees. If we look at both productivity and processes we can determine whether we can permanently adjust to a smaller government.
Salaries with benefits for employees is very large component in the growth of government. Even if we have a “no growth” stable workforce, the cost of government goes up based upon the ‘cost of living’ index plus whatever extra is built into negotiated labor contracts. If the number of workers goes up, the cost increases compound. Our goal should be to keep the actual number of employees low and make sure we can afford down-the-line impacts of labor contracts we approve today. If revenue growth is not keeping pace with the cost of indexed commitments, we are falling further behind.
Hiring new public employees should only happen when we are absolutely sure there is adequate sustainable revenue to pay for them. Hiring and laying off employees is poor usage of public resources and unfair to employees and their families.
How often have you been to any government office where you could see employees in their work environment and you wondered what work they were hired to do? Sometimes you see staff just wandering around. I don’t want to characterize all government workers as slackers, but we have set low productivity expectations for many of them so it takes more of them to get a job done.
Competitive wages and benefits should produce high quality productivity. There have been occasions where private sector contractors were allowed to bid on government work and government managers had to bid to keep the work. If government managers operated like a business and were forced to produce a competitive product, we might get more efficient government for our tax dollar.
Elected officials are responsible for fairly managing the resources of government, balancing the needs of the taxpayers with the needs of public employees. If either one gets out of whack, the operation breaks down.
If all we do during this down-turn is wait for the economy to turn and get back to business as usual without adopting any meaningful change we will have lost a great opportunity. Let’s see what happens with our local favorites and decide whether they should stay or go.
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Posted on December 17, 2008 at 3:35 pm in Partisan Politics, Political commentary, Snohomish County Council, Snohomish County Political Commentary, Uncategorized | RSS feed | Reply | Trackback URL