by Daryl Slusher
Ever heard of delayering?
It’s a new thing down at City Hall. City Manager Jesus Garza describes it as
“decreasing bureaucratic layers.” This may not
sound that exciting to some of you, but to me it is a very exciting
development. Along with quite a few other folks, I have long maintained that
city government is severely top-heavy. To have an Austin city manager
semi-admit this is an astonishing and welcome development. I was so fired up
that I chose delayering as my specialized topic of study on this year’s city
budget.
Here’s how Garza explained delayering in his “transmittal letter,” the
traditional summary letter that accompanies delivery of the proposed budget to
the council: “We continue to examine our organizational structure, decreasing
bureaucratic layers and improving the bottom line while maintaining service
delivery levels. As part of that effort, the city is pursuing the following
initiatives: Delayering initiatives, including reducing assistant director and
management layers in several departments such as Information Systems, Small and
Minority Business Resources, Water and Wastewater, Law, Purchasing, Budget and
Building Services.”
Garza goes on to list several other “initiatives”: “increasing span of
control staffing ratios;” “repositioning, restructuring and redeploying
initiatives;” “reengineering of some key business processes;” “downsizing;” and
“outsourcing initiatives,” including overtime required for recycling and meter
reading. Within this buzz of words there may be some city savings and/or
management restructuring. For instance, Police Chief Elizabeth Watson’s moves
to shift desk positions back onto the street, through attrition, falls under
“redeploying.”
I chose, however, to stick strictly with delayering. The city budget is a
tough thing to grab on to by yourself, so I thought I’d just learn as much
about this one thing as I could. Maybe a view of the larger budget would emerge
from this process. Additionally, my quest could serve as a test of what a
citizen or reporter encounters when trying to find out how his or her tax
dollars are spent. I could find out how well the city’s $2.39 million public
relations apparatus works in getting information to the people it’s supposed to
serve, people like me – “customers,” as city management insists on calling
us.
Before continuing, I must note that delayering is not a particularly pleasant
topic. That’s because it involves people losing their jobs. The case for
delayering, however, involves the greater public good. The City of Austin has
too many managers in relation to the number of people delivering basic
services, and the situation is becoming less and less acceptable as growth
stretches the limits of basic city services. More employees are needed on the
front lines, but taxpayers are already stretched to near the breaking point.
Additionally, by helping drive taxes high, the over-abundance of managers
contributes to Austin becoming a very unaffordable place to live – and I won’t
even get into their frequent poor performance and a long list of horrid
management decisions that have cost taxpayers millions. And the current epoch
is a good time for delayering. The local economy is booming, meaning that
delayerees who can’t transfer to front-line jobs can probably find employment
in the private sector.
Finding the Missing Layers
Reading Garza’s rather breathless report might lead one to believe that a
massive delayering effort is under way at City Hall – that high-level managers
are sending out r�sumes in wild panic. That is not quite the case,
although it’s difficult to tell from looking at any of the available documents.
All in all, finding out the exact results of the delayering program proved to
be quite a complex task.
The first thing I noticed was that Garza does not provide a figure
on the number of jobs eliminated through delayering, nor a dollar amount on
savings acheived. This basic information was not contained anywhere within the
city’s four budget volumes.
When I requested a list of delayered jobs (by department, title, and salary),
city officials said that such a list did not exist. Financial Services Director
Betty Dunkerley said that Garza ordered a delayering list compiled on August
17, and that an assistant is still working on it. Garza’s transmittal letter
had been presented on June 28.
I never did get that information (see box below), but from other lists that
the Public Information Office (PIO) was finally able to provide, I gleaned the
following information about overall city employment:
* Citywide, 184 jobs were eliminated – 128 filled and 56 vacant. After
creation of “new jobs” and “transfers,” however, the new budget features 13
more jobs than this year, a total of 10,014. (Brackenridge Hospital, now leased
to Seton, is not included in either year’s calculations.)
* The top layers didn’t get delayered at all. I requested a list of the top 150
highest salaried city positions. The cutoff is $68,619. No one in this group
fell prey to delayering.
* The highest paid employee to get the ax was an Environmental Services
Manager in the Environmental and Conservation Services Department. He was
making $62,836.
* Garza’s letter talks of “reducing assistant director and management layers.”
The use of assistant director in the singular works on more than one level. The
only assistant director eliminated was in Small and Minority Business Resources
(wonder what he or she did wrong). This job is listed at $54,454.
* According to my count, from a list of eliminated jobs, 29 city employees
making under $20,000 lost their jobs. Another nine vacant positions at this
level were eliminated. The biggest body counts were among employees earning in
the $20,000 to $30,000 range – 34 in each group lost their jobs. Another 31
vacant jobs in these categories were eliminated, most of them in the $20,000
range. Of the 34 occupied jobs eliminated in the $30,000 range, 13 were nurses,
social workers, or occupational therapists in the Health and Human Services
Department.
* Thirteen employees earning in the $40,000 range lost their jobs. Five of
those were nurses in Health and Human Services. Eight jobs in the $50,000 range
were eliminated (all but one filled), and the aforementioned one above
$60,000.
There are more city jobs in the lower reaches, so city officials can argue
that these numbers reflect that. The fact, however, that none of the top 150
jobs were cut, and only one above $60,000, seems to show that city management
thinks the high-level jobs are indispensible, while those at the lower reaches
are not.
A Low-Tech Count
While waiting on my lists to be churned out of the city’s public information
machine, I’ve compiled what delayering numbers I could. First, I tried the
budget documents which Garza presented to the council, press, and public. This
involved going through the sections on each department listed in Garza’s
delayering paragraph and trying to figure out how many jobs were cut, and which
ones. This was an uneven process at best. The budget documents do not feature
line items or lists of job titles or positions. Instead there are “budget
highlights” and “expenditure changes.” The expenditure changes were the most
helpful, but I was still left wanting. Some departments list which jobs were
cut, while others just list a total. And there’s no list of what the
expenditures were changed from, or what remains.
I obtained a “line item budget” from the PIO. It showed the differences
between the current and proposed year’s appropriations, but it wasn’t of much
help with delayering, because it listed each department’s salary costs as one
line item. I also obtained the two-and-a-half-inch-thick personnel log, but it
was no help either, since it didn’t list which jobs were being eliminated.
Relying on the “expenditure changes” and the “personnel summary,” I came up
with the following: In the departments cited by Garza as targets of delayering,
there is a net cut of 26 jobs. At least 21 will actually lose their jobs, or,
if they are lucky, find employment elsewhere in the city. The latter option is
a fairly sound city policy under which the Human Resources office tries to fill
vacant or new jobs with employees whose jobs are being eliminated. This policy,
however, also seems to be a device under which the city could rotate people
from eliminated jobs into new jobs of a similar layer. There’s no proof that
the city did this, and the lists to determine that were only recently
requested. Whatever the case, a net decrease of 26 jobs in the seven
departments cited by Garza does sound like it might be something of note. Let’s
take a closer look.
* Sixteen of the “eliminated” jobs – more than half – are in the section of the
Law Department that collects claims for Brackenridge Hospital. Brackenridge has
been leased to Seton, so these employees no longer have anything to do. Since
these jobs no longer have any function, it seems something of a stretch to term
their elimination “delayering.” Granted, these are eliminated city expenses
(although the verdict is still out on just how good a financial deal – or
health deal – the city got on Brackenridge). But the jobs are not part of
“decreasing bureaucratic layers.” And they were hardly management jobs anyway,
since they involved direct collection of funds, with an average pay of $30,233
(for a total savings of $483,734). That would be a nice salary for some of us,
but it is nothing by city management standards.
* Without the Brackenridge claims positions, there is a a net cut of 13.5 jobs
listed in Garza’s delayering claims. Four of them are “Legal Service” positions
elsewhere in the Law Department, elimination of which saves $188,268 or an
average of $47,067 each. All currently vacant, these are made up of two lawyer
positions, a legal secretary, and a law clerk. This does appear to be at least
part of a layer in the law department. In the spirit of generosity, let’s count
it as delayering.
* Information Systems cut four jobs, for a total savings of $171,249, or
$42,812 per job. Once again, this could be termed mid-level delayering, though
it’s hard to tell because, again, the budget provides no list of the specific
jobs or salaries eliminated. It is possible to discover in the budget that
three of the eliminated jobs are currently vacant. Meanwhile, this department
saved another $57,154 by cutting “interns, summer youth, and clerical backup” –
the bottom layer, one might say.
* Next on Garza’s list is Small and Minority Business Resources, which appears
to be the closest the city gets to true delayering. Three positions, all
currently filled, are eliminated. With only 19 positions in the entire
department, that constitutes a 15% cut. Along with the previously mentioned
assistant director, the department also cut a Public Information Specialist
making $39,310 per year and a $21,883 position providing consultant services to
the Center for Women’s Business Enterprise.
* The story at the Water and Wastewater Department is not a stirring example of
delayering. Their “expenditure changes” list no job cuts, but instead the
addition of 12 new jobs at a cost of $474,417, or an average of $39,534 per
year. (Two of the 12 positions are transfers from other departments, and are
not counted in our net job cut totals.) Yet Garza listed this department as a
subject of delayering. Go figure.
* Next come three divisions housed within the massive Financial Services
Department. First comes purchasing, where it appears that two mid- to
upper-level jobs were indeed eliminated, at a savings of $94,306. The Budget
Office also cut two positions, for a savings of $115,988, a little higher on
the mid-scale. And, Building Services cut five positions for a savings of
$218,166, or $43,633 per job. Once again, these appear to be at the lower end
of middle management.
All in all, the total delayering savings in departments that Garza cites –
being as generous as possible in categorizing cuts as delayering – come to a
little over $900,000. However, the job additions in the Water/Wastewater
Department offset those savings by nearly half. The net savings come to around
one-fifth of a cent on the property tax rate, or $1.30 for the average
homeowner.
From the Top?
One department that is noticeably missing from the delayering list is the City
Manager’s office, known officially as Management Services. The budget of that
office is $1.99 million. There is one “administrative” position eliminated at a
savings of $41,562, but as you will see, there are quite a few layers above
there.
At the top is Garza, who makes a base pay of $125,008. There are four
assistant city managers who pull a total of $376,600, an average of $94,000.
There is also an “assistant to the city manager” who makes $59,217; she is the
one compiling the delayering list. Garza also has an executive secretary and an
administrative assistant who each make $37,000, and the assistant city
managers have executive assistants who pull down a total of $171,000, or an
average of $42,750. It sure seems like there might be a few extra layers in
there.
Many, including yours truly, believe that the assistant city managers are an
unnecessary bureaucratic layer – or at least that four of them are too many.
Each has a domain of departments over which they preside. The department heads
report to them and they report to the manager. Councilmember Brigid Shea has
proposed eliminating one assistant city manager position, as has the employee’s
union. Part of the argument goes that not as many assistants are needed because
the city no longer has Brackenridge Hospital to oversee. So it would seem that
the ACMs have less work to do than last year. When a speaker made this point at
the most recent budget hearing, Garza took the floor to relate that there had
been no assistant city manager presiding over Brackenridge, because he had been
performing those duties himself since taking over the manager’s job. He seemed
to think that settled the matter.
So what did I learn on my delayering quest? The first lesson is that city
budget documents are heavy on PR and light on real budget information. This is
true not just of budget information provided to the press and public, but also
of that provided to city councilmembers who approve the billion-dollar-plus
budget. All in all, the case study of delayering doesn’t inspire confidence –
at least not in me – that this city management crew should be in charge of a
billion-dollar annual budget of taxpayer money. To sum up, let’s just say that
there’s delayering still to be done. n
This article appears in September 1 • 1995 and September 1 • 1995 (Cover).