Putting Your Local Government on a $ Diet

By Matthew Iarocci

Local governments have grown obese. There is no longer enough money to maintain their weight.

Putting Your Local Government on a $ Diet is a practical guidebook that describes numerous ways and provides specific examples of how services can be maintained and enhanced at reduced cost.

There has never been a better time to produce such a work for elected officials, public managers, professors, students and beleaguered taxpayers who are determined to make local government operate much more efficiently.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456722609

Matthew Iarocci

Mr. Iarocci recently established Public Management, Inc., to focus on reducing the cost of local government. Prior to that, he was employed as the HR Director and Negotiator for the City of New Rochelle, NY, where he bargained and implemented cost efficient programs and services throughout the city government. He served as president of the 2500 member National Public Employer Labor Relations Association in 2004-2005. After receiving a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Baruch College of the City University of New York, he taught the course in Public Personnel Management in the Executive MPA Program of that institution on two occasions and was an adjunct professor at Fordham University for seven years teaching the graduate course in Public Management. Mr. Iarocci makes numerous presentations on cost reduction to elected officials, local government managers and members of professional associations. In September 2009, he published The Art of Negotiation: A Practical Guide for Success.

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Table of Contents

Preface

The Foundation

The System

Navigating the System

Efficiency Measurement

Positions

Compensation

Service Delivery Alternatives

Supervisory Roles, Training and Development

Obtaining and Retaining the Best Managers Possible

Recipe for the $ Diet

Preface

Local governments have grown obese. Since there is no longer enough money to maintain their weight, there is no better time than the present to start on the road to fitness.

Putting Your Local Government on a $ Diet is a practical guidebook that describes numerous ways services can be maintained and enhanced at lower cost.

Its contents do not aspire to be above politics but below. The details of how work and the resultant programs and services can be accomplished more efficiently are examined and specified.

This book is an easy read. It is organized, concise and lean. All the fat has been removed.

You do not have to start at the beginning and read through to the end. If a chapter in the middle of the book piques your interest, read that one.

The important thing is to act upon what you have read whether you are an elected official, local government manager, professor, student or beleaguered taxpayer.

Throughout my career as a public manager and labor negotiator in local government, I have always focused on doing more with less even before that hackneyed phrase was coined.

I will provide a recipe in the following pages. However, a diet, whether for an individual or local government, requires long-term commitment and determination to succeed.

This is not the end all and be all in the quest for less costly local government. Please give me the benefit your ideas at [e-mail] so that, together, we may expand our practical knowledge of Putting Your Local Government on a $ Diet.

The Foundation

Why Go on a $ Diet?

Given the diffusion of power and the need for elected officials to portray a positive panorama of government services, why go on a $ diet?

Whether on a personal or government level, dieting entails self-discipline. There are no quick fixes. Diets are prone to fads: Don’t eat this, but eat whatever else you want, and you will lose a lot of weight fast. Most of us, especially those who have tried these miracle programs, know that drastic short-term diets rarely result in permanent weight loss. In many cases, more weight is quickly gained back than was initially lost.

Effective dieting involves modifying behaviors on a long-term basis. One must not only reduce the total intake of food and drink but substantially curtail ingestion of some high calorie favorites.

So why bother dieting? Certain individuals want to look fit and find the sacrifice well worth it. Others embark on a change of habit because of a health crisis.

In government, looking good often involves providing ever more services to constituents in general and interest groups in particular. That is certainly not a recipe for going on a $ diet. It is just the opposite.

However, embarking on the quest of a leaner government may reduce or eliminate the need for tax increases. The residents benefit but so too will the elected officials.

The other reason for a diet is a financial crisis that results in an inability of the governmental jurisdiction to do business as usual.

Many Cooks

In private industry, the vast majority of chief executive officers, CEOs, have gradually moved up through the corporate ranks over the course of a career in management. The CEO of the majority of local governments is an elected mayor or county executive. The CEO may or may not have experience in managing a large and complex organization.

Boards of directors of private corporations generally do not delve into the details of managing the organization. This is certainly not true of city councils, county boards of supervisors and other legislative bodies whose members often wish to probe the minutest particles of service management at the behest of constituent or lobbying groups whom they depend upon for votes and resources to keep them in office.

Notwithstanding the Jeffersonian notion that elected public service should be a patriotic duty of limited duration, most public officials have adopted elective office as a career that they hope will lead to a succession of higher positions.

The corporate CEO hires top management. In government, these officials may be appointed by the chief elected official, the professional chief administrator, the majority of the governing board or by election. The primary criterion for selection may be expertise or it may be political party affiliation or assistance in getting the hiring official reelected.

The employment of these top managers is based in large measure upon the continued office holding of whoever hired them. All too often, their actual performance is secondary in importance to loyalty to their boss or political affiliation.

Lower levels of management are usually dependent on appointees for the furtherance of their careers. They react to orders to accomplish short-term objectives. Planning for long-term improvements is generally put on the back burner since it does not pay in terms of present or future status.

Employees and supervisors understand the system as being driven by short-term assignments. Suggestions for improvement are often met with a lukewarm reception, or worse: It’s none of your business. So it is understandable that many employees adopt the credo: Don’t rock the boat. They become loathe to expand their purview: It’s not in my job description.

Legislation also contributes to a diffusion of power. For instance, many state and local governments provide by law that certain groups of public employees who have the right to bargain wages, benefits and working conditions with their government employer may, after an impasse has been reached, opt to lay their case before an arbitrator who will decide the terms of the contractual agreement.

So who is in charge? Is it the chief elected official, the legislature, appointed officials, those whom we refer to derisively as bureaucrats, powerful constituencies, profligate lobbyists, the voting public or specialized consultants such as arbitrators or urban planners?

Like it or not, in our complex and competitive democracy, each has a piece of the action.

Getting Started

There is no better time to start the diet than before the onset of a financial crisis. The later steps are taken, the less weight will be lost for good. By the midst of a meltdown, it is too late. The quick fix is in. There is no time to trend down on a permanent basis. Off with their heads! Layoffs will certainly result in sudden weight loss.

The imperative is to have the resolve to change the myriad ways work is accomplished, little by little, over a long period of time. The incremental changes that are so controversial as they are implemented will become institutionalized as part of the organizational fabric which itself becomes difficult to alter.

In the labyrinth of diffusion of power, responsibility and authority in government, who must have the fortitude and exhibit the leadership to commence the process?

Many local governments have an elected executive with extensive powers to make operational policy decisions. This is the strong mayor or county executive form of government. In some jurisdictions, the executive power may reside in an appointed position of city manager or county administrator. In yet others, a large measure of operational policymaking is placed in a city council or county board of legislators.

Regardless of the structure of the executive, the elected members of the board always possess the legislative authority to make major policy decisions embodied in law, ordinance or resolution.

The plea to reduce may surface from an elected official, a taxpayers group or a chamber of commerce, to name a few possibilities, but it is the person in the highest elected office who must take the lead in putting the local government on a $ diet.

Defining the Measures

A private firm may produce many products, but it has only one bottom line, profit.

A government provides many services, and it has many bottom lines, one for how well each service is provided. Effectiveness refers to the quality of a service.

Indicators of service delivery abound. Some are easy to measure: average response time to a fire or medical emergency, major crime solve rates and number of street miles paved. Others are more difficult to assess: social services to children, fire prevention inspection programs and police lectures to students on the dangers of drug abuse.

Under these circumstances, we tend to bundle our perception of services provided by a particular government. The village of __________ is a high service community. The so-called services of ___________ are the worst. These views may not be totally accurate, but they often pretty well sum up the effectiveness of a local government’s services.

The reverse of the effectiveness side of the coin is efficiency which, simply stated, is the output per level of input.

A simple measure of efficiency exists in refuse collection. Let us assume 10 tons of trash are collected per sanitation worker per work day. The number of routes or workers are diminished to the point that 11 tons of trash are collected per sanitation worker per work day. The efficiency gain is 1 over 10 or an increase of 10%. Efficiency can also be increased by the use of better equipment.

However, what happens to the effectiveness of sanitation collection when efficiency increases? Is the degree of cleanliness the same in areas surrounding emptied refuse receptacles? If the answer is negative, there is a situation where efficiency has increased but effectiveness has decreased.

Productivity, as applied to public services, is a combination of efficiency and effectiveness. Obviously, when efficiency increases, effectiveness often decreases and vice versa.

Increasing either of the components, without decreasing the other, results in an increase in productivity. One component can rise significantly while the other declines marginally. This also increases productivity. There are even occasions where both efficiency and effectiveness increase as a result of a change.

The primary focus of Putting Your Local Government on a $ Diet will be efficiency since that is where money is saved. However, I will also cite examples of increases in efficiency where gains in effectiveness take place.

Several situations that I will review are based upon improvements I authored and implemented in my capacity as HR Director and labor negotiator for the City of New Rochelle, NY.

The System

Civil Service

Lincoln was dogged by individuals seeking government employment throughout the Civil War. The push for reform of government employment practices had been a subject of discussion for years, but the assassination of President James Garfield by