Firstly, there's an underlying twist to the city's management philosophy based on a "non-information age" understanding of the work done by city staff. Typically, Boulder's various city departments are managed by multiple individuals earning salaries above 100k per year. Our city clerk costs almost as much as the city manager...even though she's a clerk, not a manager.
The philosophy here is that people be rewarded for some combination of term of service and level of education. To qualify to be either a "city clerk" or a "city manager" you need at least a master's degree in urban planning or management or its equivalent, plus have "x" years of job experience.
This sounds great in principle, except that it's based on a lousy set of presumptions. The tools and know-how for "running" the city are not so inaccessible as to make the task of having obtained those tools an accomplishment entitling the bearer of said accomplishment to a salary that may be 3 times what is required to find a person knowledgeable enough to do the job correctly.
In other words, the salaries don't match the market value of the jobs.
As far as I'm concerned, during the course of this campaign you will never hear a simpler and more sane description of the problem with our city government as I've expressed in the prior sentence; however, I'll add some qualifications:
A city attorney might cost more than a third of what they're paid by the City of Boulder, but I doubt that it's more than half of what our current city attorney earns. In spite of the speculative nature of this comment, you can look up cities where the budget allows for a city attorney...making about half what our city attorney earns.
In fact, there are cities all over the map that have city attorneys that earn half, or somewhere between half and the salary currently provided to Boulder's city attorney, more than suggestive of the idea that the value of the job has to be re-analyzed and that the job itself be reallocated to an individual willing to work for say...$80k per year instead of $150k. The fact that the city attorney's office last year invested a fortune defending someone's desire to stop a hamburger joint from selling beer might also be an indicator of the need for reflection on city attorney pay scales, but I personally consider that another issue entirely.
Another proposal: no salary paid by the city be equal to more than the equivalent of 2 FTE's (full-time job equivalencies) as reflected by the lowest salaries in a department. There may be room for compromise, but I will never believe that we could not find 4 very qualified individuals capable of collectively equaling the quality of work done by the person serving as city manager who takes in 4 times the lowest FTE salary in her department.
I believe that much of what I'm saying is self-evident. Politically challenging? Yes.
However...in this day and age, if the city is hiring employees who are only one-fourth as valuable as someone stuck in the city manager's position, then the city either doesn't need those employees or doesn't need a city manager earning a small fortune, take your pick.
Beyond performance ratings and personnel issues of one type or another, an across-the-board salary reduction for city staff should not hurt performance, and might very well help it, by routing out individuals who feel they are better suited for private employment. Salary reductions can take various forms, but would almost undoubtedly be best served by "reallocations" of work. In other words, jobs are redefined with lower pay scales and are then offered first to the individual already performing similar work. In other words, you can lose the 100k salary, but still have a decent salary doing roughly the same job -- if that's what you want.
The goal, in part, would be to bring the lowest-paid worker much closer to the salary level of the highest paid worker, and also...take the stress off the city's budget enough to stop the constant begging for new taxes by staff and council...
and the subtle extortion this usually entails when the city manager says, "either the tax passes or we'll just have to cut library hours."
NO THANKS on the library hours cut, I'd rather cut your pay...and by the way, if that's a problem, don't
let the screen door hit you in the ass on the way out.
(More soon.)
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