B y E m i l F r a n z i
WHEN PIMA COUNTY administrator Chuck Huckelberry submitted a budget proposal to the Board of Supervisors this year, he pulled a slick trick. He gave the board a series of options they couldn't accept, forcing them to take a look at priorities--something they never set. When he told them they could either cut law enforcement--lay off deputies, close a recently completed jail and cut prosecutors--or impose a half-cent sales tax or raise the property tax, they panicked. Huckelberry knew they wouldn't do any of the above. The problem is, this board is so dysfunctional that they don't have a clue about what they could get rid of.
Still, the board will adopt a final budget for the next fiscal year of somewhere around $600 million dollars on August 11. The tentative budget recommended by Huckelberry is still pretty much intact, but it will require surgery if the board plans to restore the cuts Huckelberry recommended for law enforcement.
We've reviewed the budget summary--which is a confusing two-inch volume representing about a million bucks a page--to give the board some ideas of what to cut.
It won't be easy, because county government still suffers from an organizational mess left over from the brief reign of former County Administrator Manoj Vyas. We have a supposedly decentralized structure superimposed on a centralized structure and we're paying for both.
Example: data processing. Throughout 1993, Vyas re-assigned a bunch of people to various departments. Then he bifurcated the old central group into two outfits named "Information Systems Application Development and Support" and "Information Systems Core Group." (Standard rule when studying bureaucracies--the more syllables in the title, the harder it is to discover what it actually does). The two new central groups now employ as many folks as before, despite having less people to serve because the public works department, the courts, the sheriff and Kino Hospital have their own separate data processing units, which also have duplicate directors and staff. And they all keep hiring more folks.
Information is a growth industry, but it's doubtful that this approach fits Toffler's Third Wave.
All this fancy computer stuff is supposed to reduce paper, right? Then why does the in-house print shop have a budget of over $2 million and 14 employees knocking out more paper than ever? And why are the prices higher from that print shop than across the street at Alphagraphics?
Of Pima County's 6,000 or so employees, 1,009 are with the sheriff's department, while 1,003 are in the public works department. The sheriff has 10 people assigned to computer duties, while public works has 70.
Other functional areas are equally schizoid, like an organizational table drawn up by Ed Moore after too many Bohemias. There used to be one Finance Department, but now we have three: Financial Control and Reporting, Financial Planning and Operations, and Risk Management. That means three department heads where there used to be one, all employing more folks, not less. Similar multiple partitions exist in Human Resources and Administrative Services.
While District 3 Supervisor Mike Boyd was babbling about "out-sourcing" and "privatization" and "cutting back on government," these guys have allowed their bureaucracies to keep growing.
And much of the growth has occurred at the top end, with many high-priced jobs that smell like good old-fashioned pork. The big "re-organization" that will cost taxpayers another bundle when all the lawsuits are settled also did brilliant things like replace three high-priced deputy county managers with five high-priced super department heads--some of whom had no visible job skills and were the recipients of political pay-offs.
Two years later, we find Huckelberry had to hire his own deputy county manager because the system wasn't working. Most of those overpaid super department heads are still there, now with no visible jobs. And they've gotten raises and acquired staffs. Pork begets more pork.
Most of the supervisors advocate consolidating city and county governments to save money. The question should be: When will Pima County government end redundancy and consolidate with itself?
Once upon a time county bureaucrats showed a little creativity in the budget process in justifying what they wanted. No more. Justifications are often hack phrases like "prior history" or "expanded needs," which translates to, "We spent that last year and we'd like to spend more." Huckelberry sent this stuff in with a straight face, which indicates he may not have read it, either.
If he had, he might have noticed these areas of waste:
• Computer systems are proliferating faster than rabbits. The new bureaucratic status symbol is a high-end PC, replacing the old mahogany desk or large wastebasket. Many more are buried in an item most departments milk called "small tools." If you totaled all the separate budgets for small tools, you'd have the inventory of half a dozen Ace Hardwares.
• While travel budgets have diminished, "training" has suspiciously gone through the roof. How much of that training is planned for places that might have something else going down at the same time, like the Super Bowl or Mardi Gras? Time for Huckelberry and the board to run the adding machine tape (don't even need a PC, guys) on these items.
• There's a vast vehicle fleet with a vast maintenance crew. Perk cars are not a high priority with voters facing more taxes or less cops.
• While it may be a small item, several areas have budget requests for food--other than obvious places like the jail or Kino Hospital. There's a $400 item in the budget of a super department head Kate O'Rielly, a former executive aide to Ed Moore who now makes $90,000 heading up the Community Resources Department. O'Reilly has one employee on staff. Subtracting vacation time for both, that comes out to about a box of donuts every day of the year. Get real.
And Huckelberry and the board haven't gotten real, or stuff like this would already be on the cutting room floor.
If you don't believe there's a lot of waste in a $600 million budget, I suggest you find some long-term county employees who reside towards the middle or bottom of the hierarchy and ask them.
Staffers are blowing smoke at Huckelberry, who turns around and blows it at board members. Unlike City Manager Mike Brown next door at City Hall, who has built a loyal bureaucracy, Huckelberry has only a few friends in the Public Works department and no constituency in a fragmented county bureaucracy with many diverse loyalties.
And the board itself is clueless, particularly the GOP majority. These were the guys who were going to reduce functions, cut employees, slash bureaucracy, lower taxes and end waste and pork. This is their third budget and they've added functions, increased the number of employees (particularly in non-critical high-end jobs), duplicated bureaucracies and added waste and pork with crap like that million bucks they blew on property for a landfill that will never be built and those hearings on the dealings of former County Assessor Alan Lang. And while the tax rate has stayed about the same, the assessments keep rising, so taxes are up.
And most of them don't grasp what all those 6,000 employees and their departments actually do. They spend almost no time investigating them or even talking to the folks who run them. Instead, they sit on the top floor and maybe read staff reports.
Paul Marsh is correct, even though he lacks specifics, when he says there's enough money to cover needs without raising taxes. There's probably enough money to give the employees who do all the real work a cost-of-living increase, instead of the hokey "merit" raises that have no objective criteria and too often end up increasing the pork.
The title of the office is supervisor, not onlooker. Until we elect more people who understand what that means, plan on seeing future budget processes as screwed up as this one.
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