The Toledo Blade has an article today about the ongoing debate over the compensation for top city officials.
The debate over hiking executive pay ranges for 70 city of Toledo top officials and lawyers intensified today as the Bell administration made its plea to city council for approval.
Many of the city’s directors, commissioners, managers, and attorneys sat quietly while Mayor Mike Bell, Deputy Mayor Steve Herwat, and others like city’s chief prosecutor, Dave Toska, told council during a committee hearing how many top city officials are paid less than counterparts in other cities and had not received raises like Toledo’s unionized work force.
Obviously, this is not a case of collective bargaining but it nevertheless reveals both the politicalization of compensation and the ineffectiveness of the current public sector system.
Put aside the dollar amounts and the back and forth between city council and the mayor over who should take responsibility over the raises. Read the article and tell me if you think this is an effective system for managing the city and their employees. Statutory pay ranges that have to be changed by legislation. Vague job categories set in city code. What is missing is any sense that efficiency and effectiveness is driving this debate. There is no sense that this is a debate about making Toledo a better place to work and live. Instead it is a political debate about who will be responsible for changing the pay and who “values” the employees.
What if instead of a bureaucratic and statutory system we had one focused on flexibility and innovation coupled with transparency and accountability? What if elected officials had wide latitude about hiring, firing, pay and benefits but made their decisions open and easily accessible to the public? After all, in most cases we are talking about well compensated professionals in city government.
In this imagined system effective managers would need to set clear goals and metrics for their departments and their employees and elected officials would in turn be ultimately responsible to the taxpayer for achieving these goals. Employes would be judged on their effectiveness in implementing the goals set by both their manager and elected officials. Elected officials would be required to defend their budgets and hiring decisions and citizens would be able to judge whether their government was being run effectively.
In times of scarce resources and a struggling economy decisions about compensation are always going to be difficult and political. But what should be driving the discussion is not the city code, or subjective debates about valuing this or that employee, but how the system is improving the lives of its citizens.
We need a system that allows for greater flexibility and responsiveness, is focused on achievement, and offers transparency and accountability. Elected officials should be empowered to tackle real problems and to seek out the most talented and effective workers. Workers would in turn benefit from a dynamic and challenging environment that rewards talent and hard work. The public would then reap the benefits of both higher quality services and a transparent and accountable government.
The private sector has a built in motivation and faces real consequences for not adapting to the world as it actually exists. Business that are poorly run, eventually go out of business, workers must competer on talent and hard work. The best employees are attracted to those companies who offer the best pay and benefits and provide a challenging and fulfilling work environment.
Contrary to those who defend the status quo, a more dynamic and flexible public sector compensation and management system is better for both public sector workers and taxpayers. Our current system is instead, inflexible, expensive and full of bad incentives while lacking transparency and accountability.
We can and should do better.