TO: SHARON PRATT DIXON FROM: SCOTT SHUGER RE: WHAT YOU NEED TO DO NOW
Shuger, Scott
TO: SHARON PRATT DIXON FROM: SCOTT SHUGER RE: WHAT YOU NEED TO DO NOW Scott Shuger You staked your campaign on the pledge to cut the city’s bureaucracy, and yesterday the voters said: “Do it.”...
...E Cutting personnel won’t cut the city’s costs enough-you have to cut pensions too...
...But the news didn’t come from Finance and Revenue...
...TO: SHARON PRATT DIXON FROM: SCOTT SHUGER RE: WHAT YOU NEED TO DO NOW Scott Shuger You staked your campaign on the pledge to cut the city’s bureaucracy, and yesterday the voters said: “Do it...
...And some divisions of DHS run much higher still: Family Services posts a ratio of .91-nearly one-to-one...
...One quick way to effectively improve the current police C/I ratio of .22-about one chief for every four Indians-would be to put many of Washington’s 3,100 under-used federal cops on patrol in the city’s high crime areas (there’s no good reason the feds shouldn’t keep paying for them...
...Additionally, in appeals this year of real estate assessments, when the city’s attorneys went up against those representing property owners, they got their heads handed to them: the result was a loss of $36.8 million in tax revenue...
...Net reductions are the rule when the functions in an office are consolidated and when pointless jobs are eliminated (see “Ready, Aim . . . Fire,” below...
...On the other hand, if you happen to have a sick baby, and it’s after 4:45 p.m...
...Thanks to the dearth of enriched and remedial courses and activities, in 12 years of school the District’s kids average up to two years’ less classroom time than the students in the nearby suburban schools...
...When you think you have a handle on the troop functions, you should work yourself up the chain of command rung by rung, asking questions along the way...
...And there are the city-wide audits by outside firms that you intend to order up yourself...
...Last year, the Fiat auto division made $1.8 billion on a mid-level-C/I of about .045...
...COPE noted that the District employs 1,250 more non-school-based staff than those comparable districts...
...Incidentally, business comparisons aren’t made often enough by those in government: One assumption that has no place in bureaucratic reform is “close enough for government work”-the idea that government agencies must be inherently sloppier and less focused than businesses, and hence can learn nothing from them...
...The description: “Ensures program compliance and approval through selected monitoring procedures...
...But one of the guys said that if you find anything out, they’d sure be interested in the answer...
...Conducts evaluation of programs, oversees and monitors programs for quality, ensures compliance to guidelines and regulations, updates and ensures compliance to state regulations [WHAT STATE?], maintains liaison to regional resource center, and maintains system inventory...
...Doubletalk about the size of the cuts is deadly most of all because your great strength as a leader is that you tell it like it is...
...government, the average mid-level chief leads a tribe of just over 3 Indians...
...Ask them which supervisors are good, and which aren’t so good, and why...
...But in elections for the board, the mayor’s endorsement is among the most sought-after, and you’ll be the one setting the overall total for the school budget...
...So resist any temptations in yourself and your staff to play rocket scientist and opt instead for being the Mayor from Mars...
...Committee on Public Education (COPE) discovered that the city’s public schools spend $536 less per pupil on instruction than comparable urban districts...
...Having three compassionate, effective people on the staff would accomplish more than the city is doing now in the area of housing,” Florence Roisman, a staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project, told me recently...
...Earlier this year Mayor Barry told Washington’s City Paper, “I maintain that any woman in Washington who is pregnant, who wants to get an appointment, can get one in less than a month...
...One way to see just how far the District has to go to attain real efficiency is to look at its mid-level-C/I...
...police force that is scheduled to retire in 1992, but we had better change the rules for the officers who take their place or this city is dead...
...That’s where the results will be the most obvious and where you can help the most citizens...
...Indeed, comparing the Teutonic precision of the District’s parking ticket writers with the Sovietized slow-motion of its ticket processors downtown should suggest that government per se is not the problem...
...Many classrooms are unheated...
...c . Make your strongest ejjiciency efforts in the worst departments...
...Even in the District’s government there are counterexamples to that: trash collection and parking meter enforcement come to mind...
...on a weekday or it’s a weekend, don’t bother visiting the walk-in clinics the department runs...
...One of the biggest obstacles to pruning back the city’s bureaucracy has been the fear that the axe would fall disproportionately on the working class...
...And it’s not just worthless administrators that somehow stick around in the schools...
...You have described your proposed cuts as “the only responsible way to avoid furloughs of the rankandfile service providers...
...Immediately upon entering office, I will conduct a thorough management audit to identify those agencies that are bloated and inefficient,” you told us during the campaign...
...And even after you’ve done all this, you have to be sure you always know what those Indians are doing, with a constant eye towards streamlining offices and eliminating pointless job slots and bad performers...
...But one of the guys said that if you find anything out, they’d sure be interested in the answer...
...That’s nine out of 6,600...
...school buildings have been poorly maintained for decades...
...Would a few suggestions help...
...The majority of D.C...
...That’s false...
...A mid-level-chiefsbndians ratio of .25 means that you have one mid-level chief for every four Indians...
...The sooner you identify the problems, the sooner you can solve (fire) them...
...And they get what they pay for: a 43 percent drop-out rate, a high-school grade average of D+, and SAT scores that are about a hundred points off the national norm-and third from the bottom...
...Despite this, at the hearings this year, the department did not request new maintenance personnel...
...And while it’s not the most spectacular example, even your house is underassessed by nearly $100,000 (MV=$350,000/AV= $253,475...
...Last year, the Fiat auto division made $1.8 billion on a mid-level-C/I of about .045...
...The city’s personnel categories are set up to approximate those of the federal government’s GS schedule, in which grades 12-15 comprise the bulk of middle management, with grades 5, 6, and 7 reflecting much of the troop strength...
...One official in the city budget office told me, “No one has ever asked that question before...
...Let’s not blow it...
...public schools, then this person has failed...
...Now, this can be taken to mean that other things being equal, cutting mid-level chiefs is preferable to getting rid of Indians...
...As of this date, however, no administrative personnel cuts have been made...
...While there are some counterexamples to tracking bureaucratic function by pay grade-such as a grade 13 dentist at a public health clinic or a grade 12 court reporter in Superior Court, both of whom are clearly service providers-overall, counting Cs and Is by these categories still develops a valid snapshot of government efficiency...
...Washington’s public housing department is sort of the reverse Royal Air Force of city agencies-never before have so many done so little for so many...
...Your theories may be right, but what have you got to lose by testing them against the evidence of the organization itself...
...While there are some counterexamples to tracking bureaucratic function by pay grade-such as a grade 13 dentist at a public health clinic or a grade 12 court reporter in Superior Court, both of whom are clearly service providers-overall, counting Cs and Is by these categories still develops a valid snapshot of government efficiency...
...Since there are fewer than 200 political appointees in the District government (and half of those are entitled to retreat to civil service jobs if they are fired), the problem goes far beyond them...
...There are also chronic shortages of toilet paper, paper towels, and light bulbs...
...But the city has legitimate needs too...
...Within days of the Norton story came the news that two candidates for D.C.’s “shadow” Senate seat-Charles Moreland and Jesse Jackson-had likewise not paid some city income tax...
...Granted, you do not directly control the public schools-that’s the school board’s role...
...When I joined the police department in 1968,” Lt...
...Firing people is not the world’s most pleasant task...
...You should have said the same thing loud and clear during the campaign...
...You have described your proposed cuts as “the only responsible way to avoid furloughs of the rankandfile service providers...
...And since when do we need to pay somebody 45 grand to take attendance...
...Now we have one deputy chief, four captains, and approximately 21 lieutenants per police district...
...Lindy Boggs (MV=$900,000/ AV=$253,450), real estate mogul Calvin Cafritz (MV=$2.8 million/AV=$ 1.5 million), commentator Carl Rowan (MV=$950,000/AV=$5 16,679), and rejected judge Robert Bork (MV=$925,000/AV= $570,000...
...Serving who...
...Like every other journalist, I have at >times missed out on an important dimension of a fact because I didn’t want to appear foolish for not knowing it...
...Not the Human Resource Development Officer ($64,041...
...So you do have considerable influence on the board...
...F. Don’t be afraid to add people in departmentsespecially if they are good assessors, auditors, tax collectors, and lawyers in revenue-raising positions...
...Due to a shortage of staff, they’ll be closed (with the exception of one clinic that still offers evening hours...
...Please read all these things carefully and with great openness, but always remember one thing: No matter how insightful, no column, no report, is the solution...
...In its most recent fiscal year, Federal Express turned a profit of $115 million on a mid-level-C/I ratio of .065...
...I’m writing now to raise issues you have to confront starting today if the cause of government efficiency in the District is ever going to be more than just another campaign buzzword: A. Making the city work will require firing a lot more than 2,000 people...
...It’s scandalous that the city government has taken absolutely no interest in discovering its own chiefs and Indians structure...
...In its most recent fiscal year, Federal Express turned a profit of $115 million on a mid-level-C/I ratio of .065...
...And aren’t the schools just too important not to use it to the utmost...
...Although grades 1 through 4 are still on the books, they are virtually unfilled, while at the other end of the scale, grades 16, 17, and 18 together make up less than three-tenths of a percent of the city payroll...
...Office of Personnel-an organiScott Shuger is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...But such pronouncements are vague enough to be taken instead as saying that we can solve all the problems just by chopping out political appointees, thus leaving civil servants untouched...
...I intend to cut 2,000 mid-management level paper pushers from the government payrolls...
...Nor the Supervisory Personnel Staffing Specialist ($50,653...
...Not the Supervisory Personnel Management Specialist (salary: $70,013...
...Currently, for instance, the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division languishes in the tranquil driveways of Embassy Row, watching for action that never comes...
...Not the Supervisory Personnel Management Specialist (salary: $70,013...
...Ask them what their main problems are...
...But such pronouncements are vague enough to be taken instead as saying that we can solve all the problems just by chopping out political appointees, thus leaving civil servants untouched...
...One example is in revenue-raising offices...
...That’s where the results will be the most obvious and where you can help the most citizens...
...congressional primary, candidate Eleanor Holmes Norton revealed that she and her husband had gone eight years without paying local income taxes, one mystery was how Norton still managed to win...
...But that’s what it takes to build up a C/I ratio of .49...
...The department’s C/I ratio is an appalling .91...
...It sounds cold to be talking of reducing benefits, and doing so could make it harder on the individual retiree...
...Ditto for competent people in pointless jobs...
...Serving who...
...Let’s get started today...
...The traditional alternative to the real courage it takes to shake a man’s hand and tell him he’s through is to give him a make-believe job where he doesn’t bother you or, better yet, transfer him to somebody else’s office...
...Even when the department appealed HUD’s decision, it still failed to submit complete paperwork...
...How about deep-sixing the Research and Data Management Coordinator (salary: $45,218...
...students and faculty have been injured by falling ceiling tiles, plaster, and window frames...
...c . Make your strongest ejjiciency efforts in the worst departments...
...Or the Program Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator (also paid $45,218...
...Of course, there are such well-known exemptions as the White House and the National Cathedral...
...What’s more, that’s all the public schools tried to terminate...
...assessments are supposed to represent a property’s full market value, so that the property owners pay their fair share of tax...
...Not only is this personally corrupting, but for the government it’s the very stuff of inefficiency...
...That’s how far off the market the city assessments are...
...Sub-par performers can be nice, they often have families, and most distressing of all for a politician, they have votes...
...Some.schools have only cold water...
...That’s why last year the group recommended eliminating 400 central staff positions...
...That’s just about one chief for every two Indians...
...Although the District school system spends 5 1 percent more than the nationwide average for public schools, only 55 percent of its budget goes to the instruction of students...
...Despite all these details, do this hard job as quickly as possible...
...Recent correspondence between officials of the District’s housing department-including Roland Turpin, the director-and HUD officials indicates that within the past year the city missed out on HUD housing vouchers and certificates worth millions of dollars earmarked for hundreds of homeless families because the department didn’t get the applications in on time and because essential documents were missing...
...You seemed to admit as much when you told the Monthly that you will do whatever it takes to get rid of rank-and-file nonperformers...
...Making the city conform to the right ideas, once you find them, is not something you can do at arm’s-length...
...On the other hand, there is plenty of danger in “reforming” activities you don’t, understand...
...But instead, as presently deployed, all they do is provide extra comfort to the District’s wealthiest residents-which merely reinforces the indifference of the rich to crime elsewhere in the city...
...Up until now, that joke has always been on us...
...On the other hand, the system spends 36 percent of its cash on what it calls “non-school-based support...
...Pension costs are rising much faster than salary costs...
...Clearly then, the city could use better staffing in the revenue-producing jobs...
...Nearly a quarter of all the grades given in the city’s high schools are Fs...
...Bathrooms with stopped-up toilets and sinks are commonplace...
...What’s worrying me now is that you never went on to say anything more than this about cuts...
...Research assistance was provided by Andrew Bates and Patrick O’Rourke...
...And precincts were manned by one captain, four lieutenants, and maybe 16 sergeants...
...How does he know...
...D . You’ve got to put more cops on the street...
...Nearly a quarter of all the grades given in the city’s high schools are Fs...
...That’s just about one chief for every two Indians...
...Some other examples: Attorney General Richard Thornburgh (market value=$475,000/assessed value=$249,635), publisher Bill Regardie (MV=$1.5 million/ AV=$760,000), Rep...
...The showers in some locker rooms have not worked in 25 years...
...You have to get in peoples’ faces...
...And finally, bureaucratic reform goes nowhere without guts...
...Start by finding out what the Indian level of the outfit is-where the ultimate function of the office is supposed to be performed (if nobody seems to know, you’ve leamed something important already)-and by finding out what those people do all day...
...But obviously, when key functions are discovered to be undermanned or manned by incompetents, the reform could easily result in more people, not fewer...
...Now, this can be taken to mean that other things being equal, cutting mid-level chiefs is preferable to getting rid of Indians...
...You recently admitted to the Monthly that the 2,000 figure was just “a conservative judgment to give the public a sense of definition of what I’m talking about,” and that you would make greater cuts “before we tax everybody out of the city...
...Although the District school system spends 5 1 percent more than the nationwide average for public schools, only 55 percent of its budget goes to the instruction of students...
...These officers are very well-trained and wellequipped...
...Some schools, apparently not getting any help from the General Supply Specialist, the Supply Management Officer, or the Inventory Management Specialist downtown (each drawing a salary of $35,294) in their attempts to get soap, make their own...
...How does he know...
...Due to a shortage of staff, they’ll be closed (with the exception of one clinic that still offers evening hours...
...Thirty-nine of the 45 salaries listed for the Department of Human Services (DHS) on the first page of the District’s fiscal publication titled “Serving the People, Meeting the Challenge” exceed $50,000, and none of the other six is below $44,639...
...Meeting what...
...Apprised of the city’s utter lack of self-knowledge, a federal personnel official said, “I don’t know how they could run a city without knowing that...
...generally, an organization fares best when it attains a ratio considerably smaller than that...
...Despite a departmental maintenance payroll that’s 50 percent larger than HUD recommends, fewer than 40 percent of the apartments the city targeted for renovation four years ago have been made ready for occupancy...
...Could that be because the department has a C/I of .64 and one administrator for every three auditors...
...But there are lesser-known ones like the three-fifths of Secretary of State James Baker’s $2.5 million house on which he pays no city tax...
...Apprised of the city’s utter lack of self-knowledge, a federal personnel official said, “I don’t know how they could run a city without knowing that...
...Besides the financial reason for hiring in these slots, there’s a crucial social one...
...When, on the eve of the D.C...
...Or the half of Oliver North attorney Brendan Sullivan’s $1.75 million residence that also skates by tax-free...
...Besides all the unsolicited help you’ll be getting from the press, the commission on budget and financial priorities for the city will soon release its findings (that’s the one headed by Alice Rivlin, former head of the Congressional Budget Office, that reportedly calls for cutting 6,200 jobs...
...Nobody among the 371 employees in the D.C...
...B a It’s not just political appointees who have to go...
...So you do have considerable influence on the board...
...government, the average mid-level chief leads a tribe of just over 3 Indians...
...The city’s public housing now includes 2,582 empty apartments-a crying shame in a city where homelessness is a major crisis...
...You seemed to admit as much when you told the Monthly that you will do whatever it takes to get rid of rank-and-file nonperformers...
...Curiously, this same man later told me that the problem with saying that you could save money by cutting midlevel people is that there are not enough of them...
...You just can’t overstate the amount that gets lost in translation between you and the troops-if you let it...
...It’s hard to understand all this verbiage, but if it says that this person’s job is to maintain quality in the D.C...
...Using this approach, you arrive at a mid-level C/I ratio for the District of .30-in the D.C...
...Bean catalog, has a mid-level-C/I ratio of .11...
...Not the Human Resource Development Officer ($64,041...
...Bean catalog, has a mid-level-C/I ratio of .11...
...But that’s what it takes to build up a C/I ratio of .49...
...How many other tax cheats has the city missed because of that...
...Provides technical assistance to programmatic efforts designed to address compliance issues identified in needs assessment...
...Thirty-nine of the 45 salaries listed for the Department of Human Services (DHS) on the first page of the District’s fiscal publication titled “Serving the People, Meeting the Challenge” exceed $50,000, and none of the other six is below $44,639...
...But another much more important one was: How did the city’s Department of Finance and Revenue miss the boat...
...Meeting what...
...G . This problem can’t be solved on paper...
...Quad/Graphics, the company that prints Time, Newsweek, and the L.L...
...Curiously, this same man later told me that the problem with saying that you could save money by cutting midlevel people is that there are not enough of them...
...B a It’s not just political appointees who have to go...
...Government is not a science-it’s a contact sport...
...24 have no running water at all...
...Earlier this year Mayor Barry told Washington’s City Paper, “I maintain that any woman in Washington who is pregnant, who wants to get an appointment, can get one in less than a month...
...The panel of civic leaders known as the D.C...
...Committee on Public Education (COPE) discovered that the city’s public schools spend $536 less per pupil on instruction than comparable urban districts...
...Despite the system’s dismal academic record, in the past two years, a grand total of nine teachers have been terminated as a result of the evaluation system...
...And aren’t the schools just too important not to use it to the utmost...
...Although grades 1 through 4 are still on the books, they are virtually unfilled, while at the other end of the scale, grades 16, 17, and 18 together make up less than three-tenths of a percent of the city payroll...
...generally, an organization fares best when it attains a ratio considerably smaller than that...
...That’s why productive operations exhibit low “mid-level-chiefsflndians”r atios...
...A mid-level-chiefsbndians ratio of .25 means that you have one mid-level chief for every four Indians...
...Ask them to identify their important tasks and their unimportant ones...
...The law limits what we can do about the pension payouts due to the 61 percent of the D.C...
...And is it really so awful to ask people in their forties to work an extra five or ten years...
...And some divisions of DHS run much higher still: Family Services posts a ratio of .91-nearly one-to-one...
...The panel of civic leaders known as the D.C...
...Lowell Duckett, head of the D.C...
...As you know, in any organization, there are jobs that are directly related to the manufacture of the product or the delivery of the service and those that are not...
...on that interpretation, you should be applauded...
...It did, however, ask for an additional $141,OOO for new staff positions...
...on a weekday or it’s a weekend, don’t bother visiting the walk-in clinics the department runs...
...I know you had a big job at Pepco , but I don’t think you had to worry in the middle of the night about whether the lines were down...
...So it’s crucial that you stock your administration with people who make it plenty clear they are going to be there longer than one or two years, long enough to “out-tough’’ the opposition...
...And probably the biggest factor in the problem is that the city’s police and firefighters are able to retire after only 20 years: that’s the reason fully $3.25 billion of the city’s unfunded pension liability-66 percent-is earmarked for those two groups...
...In the city you are about to lead, it still takes about eight years for a family to be placed in a public housing unit...
...Although many of the latter are legitimate managerial, advisory, or technical jobs, once you get away from identifiable makings and doings, there’s much greater potential for jobs that don’t really count...
...The average public school in the District has 45 fire code violations-and there have been attempts to remedy only half of them...
...Assesses non-public school needs, and maintains accurate child count...
...No other public housing authority in the country has made that mistake...
...And businesses that have shrunk to boost productivity illustrate proportionally much larger cuts than the 4 percent you’ve advocated...
...zation that doesn’t know it has almost twice as many chiefs as Indians...
...Since there are fewer than 200 political appointees in the District government (and half of those are entitled to retreat to civil service jobs if they are fired), the problem goes far beyond them...
...Using this approach, you arrive at a mid-level C/I ratio for the District of .30-in the D.C...
...Conducts state research projects for program improvement...
...The geographical boundaries of the, district didn’t change...
...In other cases, the department has withdrawn requests for HUD housing vouchers for the homeless because it “determined that the paperwork and staff time involved in securing the additional funding is administratively infeasible...
...Nor the Supervisory Personnel Staffing Specialist ($50,653...
...This .is just the first wave of tons of printed advice you will start receiving immediately...
...But in elections for the board, the mayor’s endorsement is among the most sought-after, and you’ll be the one setting the overall total for the school budget...
...But guess what...
...This too is something you need to declare publicly...
...Its payroll of 48,000 peo-ple-the costs of which take up half the city’s annual budget-gives the District nearly mice as many nonfederal government employees per capita as California, Florida, or Michigan...
...That’s why it worried me when you recently joked that your cuts of mid-management employees would effect “nobody I know personally...
...One way to see just how far the District has to go to attain real efficiency is to look at its mid-level-C/I...
...Well, setting more employees to work on recovering funds owed by the city’s rich is a very good way to share the burden of making government more efficient...
...At city budget hearings in February 1989, the man who was then the head of public housing maintenance said that on any given day 63 percent of the people under him did not show up for work...
...Avoid that...
...And the city seems just as lax when it comes to real estate assessments...
...On the other hand, if you happen to have a sick baby, and it’s after 4:45 p.m...
...on that interpretation, you should be applauded...
...The pension expenses that the District is already committed to but which its investments won’t pay for-its unfunded pension liability-now run $4.93 billion...
...From 1981 to 1989, GE increased its productivity more than threefold and its market value more than fourfold while reducing its salaried staff by 40 percent...
...This too is something you need to declare publicly...
...And they get what they pay for: a 43 percent drop-out rate, a high-school grade average of D+, and SAT scores that are about a hundred points off the national norm-and third from the bottom...
...Especially if you are armed with a commission report or two, there’ll be a great temptation for you to sweep into office with a lot of theories about what’s screwed up and how to fix things...
...By contrast for example, during the eighties, DHS changed heads nine times...
...Quad/Graphics, the company that prints Time, Newsweek, and the L.L...
...This is an unbelievable opportunity: the first hopeful moment in District of Columbia politics in a decade and also a chance to show New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and all the other rotting big city governments how to use personnel cuts to pull back from the brink of chaos and insolvency-to make our schools work, our families secure, and our streets safe...
...That’s false...
...Here’s the official description of that job: “Reviews and approves requests for proposals...
...Here are some winning plays: >The ultimate weapon of the redundant employee is his belief that any cry for reform will blow over-that he can outlast this new threat just like he’s survived all the rest...
...The city’s personnel categories are set up to approximate those of the federal government’s GS schedule, in which grades 12-15 comprise the bulk of middle management, with grades 5, 6, and 7 reflecting much of the troop strength...
...Now you do...
...Talk of cutting can easily degenerate into the mistaken idea that every gain in efficiency requires a reduction in personnel...
...Black Police Caucus, recently told me, “police districts were called police precincts...
...Thanks to the dearth of enzation that doesn’t know it has almost twice as many chiefs as Indians...
...One official in the city budget office told me, “No one has ever asked that question before...
...Granted, you do not directly control the public schools-that’s the school board’s role...
...they could make a big difference on some of Washington’s mean streets...
Vol. 22 • November 1990 • No. 10
