Jim Mork wrote:
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I particularly noticed the phrase "except for senior staff". What is the idea behind that? Is there an ASSUMPTION that senior staff are inherently the most VALUABLE staff?
WM: The value of senior staff, if senior means number of years with the
city, is that they "know where the bodies are buried," so to speak. For
example, even though the previous leader of public works got up some
peoples' noses, he had to be on board to accomplish anything because he
was the one who could supply both torque and sustaining power for a
project. Conversely, he could play paper games and delay a project till
the Second Coming if he wanted to--note that I'm not saying that he ever
did such a thing, only that it was possible for him to do such a thing.
That doesn't square with my experience as a city employee. There are people who've never worked anywhere else but the city, who certainly know a lot about city processes, but who are bad apples who spoil the barrel. Also, they are not union members, so they aren't protected by the AFSCME contract. Trouble is that it would take KNOWLEDGE of what is going on to pick them out and delete their positions, so I'm pessimistic that the political representatives will ever be able to cut deadwood.
WM: There are a few who are such obvious dead wood that you can pick it
out without going into city hall.
The problem I hope RT will invest in reforming is the flow of paper and the amount of paper that flows and where it flows to. Reformers come through cities on a schedule, more or less, and they always make promises and decisions that change how departments are put together. However, none of them ever thinks about the paper. The paper from previous reforms doesn't go away, another layer is added to what was already too much. True, cities run on contracts and they have to be papered three ways from the middle. But there are other layers and layers that build up to an astonishing amount of wasted effort.
This phenom is less obvious in Minneapolis because it's young, for a city. As an exercise in futility, I once tried to get a fence installed on a playground in Manhattan. In Minneapolis, there is a way to do it with city approval, even though it might take a while. In NYC, fogeddaboudit. The only way to make that fence happen was to put it up illegally with the remote possibility that the city would discover it and take it down sometime before we identify ETs with certainty.
WizardMarks, Central
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