Comments on: Open Thread

By: Tripper Jones

Tripper Jones — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:38:21 +0000

Oaklanders,

Did you all know that Oakland has a new public crime mapping service at CrimeMapping.com? You can even subscribe to crime alerts. Get this, Lincoln, Nebraska has over 1,000 subscribers and Oakland, CA has 3 subscribers. I honestly don’t think anyone knows about this site.

Check it out:

http://www.crimemapping.com/map/ca/oakland

Tripper Jones

By: livegreen

livegreen — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:45:13 +0000

It would be nice if we can stick to Oakland. We have enough complications figuring out what’s going on here…

BTW, I understand the City will be asking employees to take a pay cut, something like San Francisco & it’s employees union had agreed to (someone here asked about this before).

By: californio

californio — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:43:34 +0000

It may be that the ratios change, year after year–who knows? Maybe CH2M Hill is gone. I don’t know.

The idea is far from absurd, in any event.

A recent edition of the Chicago Tribune reports that privatizing the police for minor functions is being considered in that major city: “As the city and its police union near the two-year mark in contract negotiations, Mayor Richard Daley on Saturday said a proposal to allow private security guards to write tickets is worth exploring.

Only Chicago police officers can issue citations, but two far South Side aldermen want armed security guards who patrol business districts in their wards to have that authority as well.”

Would these “armed security guards” be municipal employees and show up as FTE’s? I think not.

Here’s a link to an article in the Portland Mercury describing the same thing: http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Content?oid=288453&category=22101

It’s all over the place.

Privatization, the commingling or separation of county and city functions, etc., skews numbers by making some services invisible on the chart. Bit of a dead horse, though.

By: V Smoothe

V Smoothe — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:14:14 +0000

That’s simply not true. For 2007, Sandy Springs, GA had 233 city employees. Like most suburbs, they don’t operate their own library or school system – they have county libraries and schools. They have their own police and fire department. Perhaps Sandy Springs contracted with CH2M Hill to assist in incorporation, but it isn’t a privatized city at all.

By: Max Allstadt

Max Allstadt — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:03:45 +0000

Um… re: private Fire Departments:

In the 1800s they had those in some cities. Sometimes two different fire departments would show up at the same fire, and instead of fighting the fire, they’d get into a brawl with each other over who got to fight the fire. Seen “Gangs of New York”?… that incident was based on historical fact.

By: californio

californio — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 17:56:32 +0000

Quoting Naomi Klein, “The Shock Doctrine, Page 533. “In September, 2005…the residents of Sandy Springs (Georgia) were approached by the construction and consulting giant CH2M Hill with a unique pitch: let us do it for you. For the starting price of $27 million a year, the contractor pledged to build a complete city from the ground up. A few months later, Sandy Springs became the first “contract city.” Only four people worked directly for the new municipality–everyone else was a contractor. Rick Hirsehorn, heading up the project for CH2M Hill, described Sandy Springs as “a clean sheet of paper with no governmental processes in place.” He told another journalist that “no one in our industry has done a complete city of this size before.”

The back story here is that the wealthier, whiter citizens of Atlanta suburbs got fed up with paying property taxes to Fulton County to subsidize inner city schools and the like, so they incorporated and contracted out all services.

“Cities on a Hill” has similar information on a planned community in Florida going back to the mid-1980s. Privatized school systems have been tried in various municipalities as well.

There is no state or federal law requiring municipalities to provide anything at all “publicly,” and cities across the country, generally in more conservative areas, see no reason not to privatize everything from schools and libraries to police and fire services.

Oakland could easily be managed with 100 municipal employees. Probably a quarter of that. I’m sure CH2M Hill would be happy to help. Maybe with the assistance of Blackwater.

Admittedly, so far the totally-privatized municipalities are smaller and more suburban than Oakland. It may very well be that large cities like Fort Worth or Dallas contract out much more than we do, however, given their conservative bent, and this would have an effect on numbers of FTE’s, artificially decreasing them for the same level of service. How can you tell without doing the research? I sure don’t know.

As civic problems in places like Oakland and Richmond become increasingly difficult to manage, the citizens may warm up to the idea of privatization. Who cares whether the police are private or “public” as long as they do the job? That’s the mentality. If by privatizing police and fire you could put twice as many people on the job for the same gross pay, would you do it? A lot of folks would, especially Republican-types like you see in Fulton County, Georgia. Why pay union salaries and benefits for people to wax red trucks all day? Why have Deborah Edgerly on board? Is she worth $275K yearly to CH2M Hill? Do we need Nancy Nadel? Dan Lindheim? How do they contribute? That’s the line of thinking.

Not that I endorse it. It’s pretty scary, actually, to imagine an entire city run for profit. The point is that it’s being done, and that every place it is done, and to whatever degree, privatization effectively skews the numbers on charts like the one in question.

By: V Smoothe

V Smoothe — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:53:30 +0000

Californio, that’s completely ridiculous. Can you provide a single example of any city that has contracted out police, fire, libraries, and parks and rec? How absurd!

By: californio

californio — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:45:40 +0000

The problem I see is that similarly-sized cities might be able to provide exactly the same services with vastly different numbers of FTE’s. It would be possible to run a city the size of Oakland with 100 employees, if you were to contract out the police and fire services, library, parks and rec, etc., etc. (That’s the reality in some cities, as I mentioned in a previous post.) Such a scenario would make it appear that the city is being run with a very small number of employees, but that is only because most of the work is being Blackwatered and Bechteled. The numbers alone don’t tell the story. That’s why the discrepancy between NYC and LA seems so revelatory. In cases where private contractors are being used, to take only that one example, an apples-to-apples would necessitate factoring back in all the employees of the contractor. I don’t think those employees show up in the chart as is. “How many people each city employs” can be unrealistically high or low depending on, among other things, the degree to which contractors provide services.

By: V Smoothe

V Smoothe — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:08:44 +0000

californio, I think you’re trying to make things a lot more complicated than they actually are. The comparison is pretty simple – how many people each city employs. What is it, exactly, that’s such a mystery to you about that?

By: californio

californio — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:14:08 +0000

Might be the school district, might be the county, all true. The numbers alone, though, clearly don’t tell us much. If you saw statistics showing, say, 19 cancer patients per 100,000 in NYC but 74 in LA, you’d be right to question the consistency of data collection and tabulation.

As it stands, I don’t see a way to do an apples-to-apples comparison among cities regarding number of FTE’s.

Is there more consistency regarding salary levels?