Create a Civil Service That Is Accountable and Skilled
Berm, James
My Favorite Reform Create a Civil Service That is Accountable and Skilled BY JAMES BENNET After 20 years in office, Coleman Young announced last year that he would not run again for mayor of...
...Among my personal favorites were the lifeguards of Coney Island in the thirties, documented by Robert Caro: Some were grossly overweight, some spent their days fishing from the lifesaving dories, and some were afraid to go near the water because they couldn't swim...
...You see, out of the city's 16,023 employees, Archer was permitted to replace exactly 150...
...But the irony of the system—candidates forever running against unaccountable bureaucrats—is that it only deepens respectable repugnance for politics, making the possibility of real change more remote...
...Archer spent the weeks before his inauguration painstakingly picking a new team interested in "opening the windows and letting fresh air into City Hall...
...This is nuts...
...And many bureaucrats are not so well-meaning...
...Mayors with good ideas need to be able to hire people committed to and accountable for enacting them...
...Mayors—and James Bennet, an editor of The Washington Monthly from 1989 to 1991, is the Detroit bureau chief of The New York Times...
...Isolating public workers from public influence has turned out to be a colossal mistake...
...In New York—as in other cities, states, and the federal system—you still have to know someone to get a government job, because figuring out what jobs are available and how to apply is so hard without the guidance of an insider...
...Further, in an era of computerized payrolls, scandal-hungry local TV news reporters, and tightening disclosure rules, it would be no easier for political machines to buy votes with dollars or to stuff ballot boxes in a spoils system than it is now...
...That same desire to create a neutral class of expert servants spilled over into government reform, encouraged by the growing conviction—particularly among the educated elite that captained the government reform movement—that anything associated with "politics" was dirty...
...When I was covering city government in New York, shelter workers would call to rage, using jargon it took quite a while to penetrate, about the manipulation of civil service rules by the social services' administrator...
...Instead, they elected Dennis Archer, a former Michigan Supreme Court justice who promised to revive the city's bureaucracy...
...Reformers could prevent such abuses without dumping patronage altogether, however...
...A licensing process was created for doctors, for example, to ensure competence and honesty...
...While many bureaucrats are hard-working, well-meaning people, the system seems inevitably to encourage them to focus on procedures rather than results...
...After all, if he hoped to energize the city government, he couldn't waste a single appointment...
...My Favorite Reform Create a Civil Service That is Accountable and Skilled BY JAMES BENNET After 20 years in office, Coleman Young announced last year that he would not run again for mayor of Detroit, where almost one in three people lives in poverty and the true unemployment rate is anybody's guess...
...I represent the people who can't get their garbage picked up on time, their streetlights to stay on all night, their phone calls answered at City Hall," he said...
...Ask yourself: If the size of the public workforce is limited and competence required, why is there anything corrupt or dishonorable about trading a vote for decent services, or even a vote or campaign work for a job...
...The voters pointedly did not replace him with his anointed successor...
...Insist that latter-day patronage appointees pass civil service tests: The lifeguards should know how to swim and the accountants to add...
...Unfortunately, the analogy was flawed...
...There is probably a deeper reason that people start fidgeting when you praise patronage...
...One of the first signs in Detroit that Young would not run again was the whispering last spring among city employees that his appointees were seeking to burrow into tenured civil service positions...
...governors and presidents—with bad ideas need to be deprived of the excuse that unap-pointed civil servants are undercutting their efforts...
...This is in part because the abuses of the old patronage systems were so spectacular...
...In New York City, Rudolph Giuliani, taking over a government not known for its nimbleness, was allowed to appoint 1,200 people...
...Civil services have not eliminated, but merely revised, many of the old abuses...
...At about the same time revulsion was rising against Tammany Hall, reformers were pushing for the creation of certified professions in the private sector...
...In other words, while certification helped weed out incompetent doctors, it did not entirely insulate the suitable ones from public influence...
...Nevertheless, the impulse to create and insulate civil service solons has persisted, fanned by journalists and academics with a bias for neutrality and tenure...
...None called about her homeless policies...
...Archer's predicament is hardly unique...
...Out of more than 216,000 city employees...
...Turning a large portion of civil service positions into appointed ones remains perhaps the only lunatic-fringe Monthly reform, one that policy types still nervously edge away from...
...Unlike most civil servants, doctors in private practice do not have monopolies on the services they provide and need, for the most part, to supply good care to attract and retain patients (and avoid lawsuits...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 4
