Main Street Journal: On the River: Downsizing Government

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The following article is taken from the (November 2010) issue of the Main Street Journal. Click “Subscribe Online” above to start your subscription.

Downsizing Government
By: Joe Saino

Downsizing government at all levels is the goal of a lot of people, particularly after the election of President Obama and his massive expansive of programs, czars, government regulations and boards. As an example of ineffective major government departments look at the Departments of Energy (budget $24.1 billion) and the Education Department ($134 billion). President Jimmy Carter set the Energy Department up in 1977 in order to end the United States dependence on foreign oil. Then Carter set up the Education Department in 1979 to improve national educational levels. Clearly neither has worked.

Downsizing local government is of much more interest due to our high local tax rate and our poor local economy. Our problem with local government employees is that we pay not only for their salaries but we also pay for their inflated benefits, pensions and health care. Let us assume that the salaries are competitive with private sector salaries for the same job skills. However when you add in benefits, pensions and health care costs you find that the public sector employee is 45% higher in cost than the private sector employee. Therefore it makes sense to contract out government services to the private sector thereby saving the taxpayers the legacy long term costs of these inflated benefits, pension and health care costs.

Therefore I have gone through the local budgets (City and County) and have come up with some suggestions. Let’s start with the City of Memphis since it is clearly one of the worst offenders in terms of overstaffing and underperforming. Here are some suggestions.

City Attorney’s Office. Hire part time outside attorneys on an hourly basis and do not allow them onto the city pension and health care benefits.

Community Enhancement. Turn over grounds maintenance to a public citizen run City Beautiful Commission and let them bid out this work to local grounds maintenance people. Also under code enforcement, reduce the number of field employees and employee local engineering firms on a bid basis to do field inspections.

General Services. Turn over Fleet management on a bid basis to auto and truck repair firms. On property maintenance and real estate management no City has more property management and property maintenance firms than Memphis. Let them bid on this work. The City has done a lousy job in this area, particularly on fleet management.

Park Services. If there was ever an area that calls out for change back to the past, this is it. The Parks Department used to be managed professionally by a Citizen Park Board. It was universally praised for fair, efficient and open transactions until it ran afoul of racial politics and pork spending. Turn it back over to a citizen staffed public board and performance will go up and costs will go down.

Public Services and Neighborhoods. This division contains some prime examples of dysfunctional and useless government functions. My favorite for dissolution is the Office of Multicultural and Religious Affairs. This is a plum job created to give work to friends of the former Mayor. It does nothing useful. Another is Animal Services which should be immediately privatized by bidding it out. A third is Motor Vehicle Inspection. Why are we building a fourth inspection station and hiring more people when Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga have bid out this work to private firms and actually gain an income from the outsourcing.

I am sure there are many more examples from the City, County and the school systems but there can be no doubt that this is the course to follow to lower governmental cost, lower the tax rate and spread the work to the “for profit” taxpaying world and away from more and bigger government.

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