What’s the purpose of city government?
When you’re an unusual person, you may figure something just like the establishing of certain kinds of rules (mainly around business and constructing) and the providing of certain kinds of services (from parks to policing).
City residents, business owners, developers and visitors pay taxes with which we generally expect whoever it’s in City Hall to responsibly use to perform the aforementioned tasks.
The rule-making, administrative ordinance-passing side of city government is one thing. The providing of services is one other.
Ostensibly, the goal of municipal service-delivery is to supply services the taxpaying public wants and desires, effective, efficiently and at an affordable cost.
It shouldn’t matter, in theory, if a city can do that with in-house employees or in the event that they contract out to a non-public company to do the work or in the event that they don’t become involved in any respect and let private residents work things out, right?
Services are services.
But what if, say, government employees with an incentive to maintain things in-house irrespective of what were to band together, pool their money together and make sure the individuals with the ability to choose how services are delivered and by whom are on their side and won’t do anything contrary to the interests of presidency employees?
That will be crazy right, almost corrupt?
Right?
Well, that’s essentially the established order in cities across the state. And the results are real.
Besides the upper costs city taxpayers pay for lesser service, there’s the continuing problem of pension crowd-out, which is when the rising cost of covering the price of city employees’ pensions crowds-out money that might’ve otherwise gone to city services.
Back in 2018, the League of California Cities warned, “Rising pension costs would require cities over the subsequent seven years to just about double the share of their general fund dollars they pay to CalPERS.” Cities like Los Angeles have long needed to put aside around 20% of their general fund budget toward pensions. That’s plenty of money that might’ve gone to, I don’t know, paving town’s horrible streets or getting the homeless off the streets or fighting crime.
When you see someone is “Proudly endorsed by the Blah Blah Peace Officers Association” or SEIU Local Whatever, with a glossy mailer showing smiling city employees, yeah, those are the people corrupted by the general public sector unions who won’t really ever challenge what advantages the unions.
They may get a report stating that this or that service currently provided by a city may very well be done just as well by a non-public company, at significant savings to town, after which toss it within the trash because they don’t wish to anger the general public worker union whose members can be impacted.
An example of this happened just before the pandemic in town of Riverside, where the council received a report which, in response to the Southern California News Group, “said town could potentially save a major amount of cash by outsourcing” trash collection to non-public corporations. The town on the time picked up trash in two-thirds of town, while a non-public company performed the duty in the remaining of town.
Many of the council members understood what was said within the report and dismissed it anyway, with one council member even suggesting a greater idea can be to have town take over all trash collection in town. “That way today we are able to walk away with clarity for current staff concerning the status of their jobs being in-house,” Councilwoman Erin Edwards, backed by SEIU 721, which represents city and county employees, said. “After this meeting, the conversation can be, ‘Will we bring all of it in-house or will we proceed the established order?’”
I feel this may very well be said accurately of just about any city: there’s no reason for the federal government to be within the trash collection business. There are many private corporations across the country that perform this task. There’s no need for presidency employees to do it.
Now, someone might said, “OK, sure, but that’s just trash collection, what about all the other things cities do?”
Well, to that, I refer you to contemplate the next.
“Virtually every category [of public services] has been or is being provided by a non-public organization somewhere in america: police, fire, paramedics, roads, water parks, recreation, garbage — even tax assessment,” wrote Robert Poole 4 many years ago in “Cutting Back City Hall.”
Considered one of the cities that got here closest lately to pulling this off is Sandy Springs, Georgia, which, upon its incorporation in 2005, sought to outsource as many public services as possible to the private sector.
That is the way it worked in response to a 2012 Latest York Times story: “Applying for a business license? Speak to a lady with Severn Trent, a multinational company based in Coventry, England. Need to construct a recent deck on your own home? Chat with an worker of the Collaborative, a consulting firm based in Boston. Need a word with individuals who oversee trash collection? That will be the URS Corporation, based in San Francisco.”
A couple of years ago, Sandy Springs walked back a few of this, figuring they might apply some private-sector principles while bringing things in-house. But Sandy Springs showed that, yes, even in modern times what Poole observed in 1980 still holds up.
Lots of the tasks city governments tackle can actually be done just as well, even higher, by the private sector. They usually can definitely be done more flexibly than public worker unions would like.
Public sector unions will fight any and each reform to how their employers do business. Firefighters unions, for instance, act prefer it’s within the gospels for fire departments to supply paramedic services (which may very well be and sometimes are done by the private sector) because they don’t want anyone to note that almost all municipal fire departments are principally just glorified, overly-expensive emergency medical organizations which sometimes put out fires.
Nevertheless it’s time for the general public to understand that for all the cash they pay to city governments, they will normally get more bang for his or her buck. The secret is a willingness on the a part of city leaders to place the interests of the taxpaying public first and ensure all city operations are done as efficiently and effectively as possible, even when it takes outsourcing to the private sector to do it.
Sal Rodriguez will be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com