In the past decade, the number of executive and management employees at the city of Austin has grown by 42 percent and 20 percent, respectively, while the number of lower-level staffers who deal more directly with the public has grown at a far slower pace: 10 percent. The numbers are raising concerns among City Council members, just as the council is about to consider and approve a new city budget. “I was floored,” said Council Member Bill Spelman, who received the numbers from the city’s Budget Office on Aug. 30 in a written response to questions he posed. “It seems that we may need to think about scaling back our administrative apparatus and focus more on the people who are doing the work” of providing services to the public, he said. Union officials have sharply criticized City Manager Marc Ott for what they describe as a ballooning of city management staff at the expense of front-line employees. For example, an analysis the union did recently using city data showed that the number of division managers has spiked to more than 70 citywide over the past four years, costing $6.8 million a year in salaries. Spelman and other council members said it might be too late in the crafting of the 2013-14 budget to immediately address what could be a systemic staffing problem. Ott and his budget team began writing the 2014 budget this spring and proposed it in early August. The City Council can change the details when it adopts a final budget this month that will take effect Oct. 1. But council members are scheduled to vote on the budget Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and they rarely make sweeping changes this late. Ott’s proposed budget calls for adding 376 city jobs, giving raises of 1.5 percent to most city employees and increasing the property tax rate and several utility fees, which would cause the typical Austin household to pay an additional $173 next year in city taxes and fees. None of the 376 new jobs would be executives, and only 27 would be managers or supervisors; the rest, 349, would be lower-level staffers. Given three days to respond to this story, the city didn’t answer specific questions. But the city released study results that show Austin’s manager-to-employee ratio is similar to that of several other large cities in Texas. Deputy City Manager Michael McDonald sent this written statement Friday evening: “We have always taken great measures to monitor the balance between management vs. non-management positions in the City of Austin. Based on our knowledge of peer and other large cities, we believe our staffing levels are within a reasonable ratio and range.” McDonald continued: “Austin has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, and the City of Austin organization has in turn enhanced its workforce to meet increasing service demands.” A ‘disturbing trend’ From 2004 to 2013, the city’s workforce grew by 12 percent, from 10,971 to 12,290 people. Of the 1,319 jobs added during that time, 42 were executives, 303 were managers or supervisors (below the executive level) and 974 were lower-level staffers who don’t supervise anyone. The highest percentage increase, 42 percent, was in executives. The numbers translate to about 5.7 lower-level staffers for every executive or supervisor in 2004 and a ratio of roughly 5.2 to 1 in 2013. “This is the kind of disturbing trend that we’re always talking about with state and federal budgets: more growth at the top, more management, but not spending as much time and money on the people doing the work,” Spelman said. “It begs the question: Why did we do it this way?” It’s not clear why management positions were added more rapidly than lower-level staff, which departments have the most high-level jobs or how much all the added jobs cost. Budget officials didn’t give Spelman an explanation of the numbers in their written response to him, and they didn’t respond to questions from the Statesman. “The growth phenomenon of executive and supervisory positions has not been reflected in front-line positions, and I think that’s very concerning,” said Council Member Laura Morrison, who has reviewed the staffing numbers. “I have asked what we have in our business model that is driving up our costs, and I think this is one of those issues.” “It has a significant impact on the budget in two ways,” Morrison said. “One, management-level positions are higher in salary and higher in cost; two, we are mostly holding flat the number of nonsupervisory people who are directly providing services to Austinites.” The increase in management was underway five years before Ott took the helm as city manager in 2008. Toby Futrell preceded him. The City Council also signs off each fall on the city budget, the document that lays out which jobs will be part of the city’s workforce in the coming year. In recent years, the council hasn’t raised big concerns about increases in high-level staffers. McDonald, the deputy city manager, said in his written statement Friday that other large Texas cities have roughly the same ratio of lower-level employees to managers. Fort Worth’s ratio is 5.59 to 1 and San Antonio’s ratio is 5.73 to 1, he said. And executives make up about 1 percent of the total workforce in Austin, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Dallas, he said. Some executives needed An increase in management staff at City Hall isn’t necessarily out of line, given Austin’s population boom, said Terrell Blodgett, a retired professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. “It’s easy to take raw numbers and assume they show an alarming trend, when it’s not known if the city was understaffed in previous years at the executive level and now is trying to do some catch-up,” said Blodgett, who has specialized in the study of state and local governance. Austin’s population grew 22 percent over the past decade, from 692,102 people in 2004 to 842,750 people today. That rapid growth “not only requires nonsupervisory or (front-line) employees, but it does require some executive-level thought given to everything that is going on,” Blodgett said. “Legitimate arguments can be made for having people who stand back at the executive level and survey the scene in their discipline or area and try to help the nonsupervisory employees use their time better and get the job done,” he said. But AFSCME, the union that represents about 1,800 of the city’s 8,000 non-public-safety employees, says the city is wasting money on a bloated management team. The union is pushing for a higher employee pay raise next year — 3 percent — than the one Ott has proposed. The union recently asked for and analyzed payroll and staffing records from 2009 to 2013. Among other things, the union concluded that over those four years: • One out of every three non-public-safety jobs filled at the city has been a management or executive job. • The city added 10 Officer and 10 Deputy Officer positions to lead city offices, at an average salary of $109,000 each. • The number of division managers has increased. “The explosive growth in management has added numerous layers of unneeded bureaucracy,” said union representative Caitlin Brown, who researched and compiled the data. Ott recently hired a fifth assistant city manager, Rey Arellano, who will start Sept. 30 and earn a $200,117 salary. Ott also has a deputy city manager. Arellano’s job isn’t a newly created one, but a vacant chief-of-staff post with a $112,216 salary that has been retitled and that will now cost $87,901 more, city spokesman Kyle Carvell said. Ott has created nine new city offices and departments and consolidated two during his five-year tenure, the budget office told Spelman recently in a written response to other questions. Most of those departments have been staffed by moving city employees from other departments, not adding new ones, the response said. However, hiring or promoting people to lead the new departments has cost an additional $676,411 per year, the budget office told Spelman. For example, in the 2009-10 budget, Ott added a chief environmental sustainability officer for $142,204 to manage a new Sustainability Office that oversees initiatives championed by the City Council to help the environment and reduce the city’s dependence on fossil fuels. “When you create a new department, you create an opportunity for duplication of overhead … the possibility that each department needs a public information person, a finance person, someone to manage the building,” Spelman said. “It’s not clear to me if we need all of that.” To see a more detailed list of the number of executive, manager, supervisor and nonsupervisor jobs at the city of Austin over the last decade, go to statesman. mystatesman/news/news/local-govt-politics/council-members-question-growth-of-austins-managem/nZqJB/?icmp=statesman_internallink_textlink_apr2013_statesmanstubtomystatesman_launch
Posted on: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 14:14:41 +0000
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