Why the County's Broke

by Mark Scaramella

You know Mendocino County is having serious budget problems when the County Employees Union recommends the suspension (not elimination) of the County-run yoga and tai-chi classes.

No, I didn't make that up. Mendocino County taxpayers fund yoga and tai-chi classes for County employees so inclined. Budget cuts hit the wall at Feng Shui Street, although the County has funded a 'Wellness' office for years. The Wellness girls offer hard-hitting advice cautioning employees against gluttony and sloth, advice that has obviously been ignored by most County workers.

Last week the Mendocino County Employees Bargaining Unit sent the Board of Supervisors a list of budget reduction options they called "Potential Savings #1 — 04-05 Budget."

The list is four pages long and opens with the following introduction:

"In early April, SEIU Local 707 requested that members provide options for budget reductions that would help offset the need for layoffs. The response was overwhelming. The following unfiltered suggestions represent paths to explore for budget savings. SEIU does not formally endorse any suggestion at this time, but believes that they are worth exploring."

The SEIU's list is a mixed bag, fairly typical of what you'd expect from employees of any organization, but comes with some uniquely Mendo suggestions. Here are the solid ones:

• Eliminate the Mendocino County Alliance. (Estimated savings: $350,000.)


• Delay Supervisor pay raises. (Estimated savings: $20,000.)


• Eliminate Supervisors "DC junkets." (Estimated savings: $8,000.)


• Offer early retirement incentives. (Estimated savings: $500,000.)


• Put the county's Wellness Program (aka "MCWOW") on "hiatus." (Estimated savings: $194,000.)


• Consolidate the Juvenile Hall food service program with the jail's food service. (Estimated savings: $86,000, "plus employees.")

The rest of the list is made up of suggested cuts without dollar savings cited. Of these, some are serious and some are trivial, but they are indicative of the County's historical inability to deal effectively with budget cuts.

If Mendocino County pays for tai chi and yoga classes, document shredding in San Francisco, expensive medallions for graduates of obscure County training programs, a foster parent holiday party, inter-office courier services, catered lunches, conferences in expensive locales, full color brochures and reports, and what the SEIU's budget-cut list calls 'touchy-feely' training programs in Social Services, then the last few years of alleged belt-tightening have been purely rhetorical.

The SEIU apparently thinks that Mendocino's supervisors and department heads can and will critically examine wasteful and expensive spending that includes them. There's no evidence that Mendo management has any interest in looking for cost savings in such major areas as the County's phone vendor contract, new equipment purchases, outside services contracts, the County's office supplies contract, County vehicle authorizations, facility rentals, computer upgrades, caseload assignments, utility usage, outside training, and on and on and on. To slash these indulgences would mean that department heads and the County's profligate Board of Supervisors would have to admit that these expenditures are not now and never have been cost-effectively arranged, let alone obtained at the lowest cost.

Unless the employees come up with a lot more specifics, these general recommendations probably are unlikely to be seriously considered by anybody in Mendo's out-of-touch management team.

It's time for the meat ax not tweezers.

Other potential cost cutting areas on the SEIU list, however, while not providing much in the way of specifics, are worthwhile, and, even in Mendocino County, have some chance of being implemented. SEIU wants to consolidate drug testing by not making clients of more than one agency undergo separate drug tests. County workers would like to see management assume some work load, at least for the time being. Additional savings could be achieved by shutting off power at night (as required by County policy), suspend bottled water contracts where drinking fountains are available, discontinue catered lunches, limit travel to 180 miles one way (which would allow trips to San Francisco and Sacramento but not to Vegas and Palm Springs), suspend non-essential training, reduce free food for clients in parenting classes, and generally spend public money as if it were their own, a notion that now sounds quaint but once obtained everywhere in government up through the 1940s.

Surprisingly, the employees don't mention the bloated compensation of department heads themselves, nor do they address gross redundancies in County organization and management. There's no mention of departmental consolidation, consolidated client intake; no mention of the fat (and fat-headed) staffing of Public Health and Mental Health, grown to twice their sizes over a decade. (The County Sheriffs Department handles the heaviest, most difficult patients for Mental Health.) Of course it's a little much to expect an employee's union to recommend employee reductions.

The SEIU list also reflects some misguided attitudes on the part of at least some employees. For example under "landscaping" a union member comments: "Reduce or eliminate landscaping to show the public the cuts directly." And under "County Services" a union member says: "Shut non-essential County offices every Friday so that the public feels pain and workers can catch up."

"Non-essential county offices" is too vague, and inflicting public pain would harm public employees themselves because it would make the public even more hostile to government than it is now. Employees ought to go after the inept County management apparatus itself, beginning with the Supervisors and its twin towers of incompetence, the County Counsel's Office and the County Administrator's Office. Employees might also consider a ban on hubby-wifey managers, folks like the Mordhorsts, both of whom draw salaries in the $80 thou ranges.

The problem is a local management and a pseudo-liberal political class that won't deal effectively with California's grotesque patchwork of redundant programs and agencies and won't tax their padrones, the rich. (It was this crew of faux libs, with big assists from mega-Democrat and now Supervisor candidate Joe Louis Not So Wildman, that brought us the ongoing Freedman debacle, a debacle that has cost the County many thousands in wholly avoidable expenditures. Neither the election of Wildman or Kendall Smith nor the re-election of Supervisor Shoemaker is in the interest of any County working person, and certainly not in the interest of County employees. With four libs and a lab — Wagenet, who's half a lib — functioning as Supervisor, management types will not only be more numerous, they'll thrive at the expense of line workers who will be laid off and stiffed generally.)

The anonymous SEIU assembler of these suggestions ends by saying, "Most of these potential cost savings merit further analysis. The Union requests that the County provide an accounting of the current costs and expenditures for the above items and the potential cost savings based on Member's recommendations."

Anecdotal reports suggest that Mendocino County spends a lot on phony sick time and short-term disability leave, which is par for a course managed by people who have never worked in the private sector. Even though all employees fill out time cards indicating how much time they're off, Mendo management makes no effort to analyze this lost time to see if certain departments or facilities are experiencing high rates of people being out of the office and why they're out of the office. Needless to say, the primary abusers are people at the supervisory levels of local government, including the supervisors themselves.

One County employee who's been following this year's budget cuts very closely noticed that the Supervisors recently voted to eliminate seven low-level Probation Department assistants. This odd way of making one department take such a disproportionate cut caused the source to say, "I've heard that MacAllister [the county's long-time Probation Department head] offered up a bunch of assistant positions for cutting so that he'd look good and get an extra merit increase before he retires." The source added, "They could have saved half those positions if MacAllister cut his own lavish travel and per diem budget. He's out of the office more than he's in."

Nevertheless, the Employees Union has at least tried to show the Supervisors that there's a lot of fat in the County budget, which even after three years of increasingly tight public money still hasn't been systematically addressed. But if the Union really wants the supervisors to deal with these recommendations, they're going to have to make them part of their upcoming contract negotiations, which is unlikely to happen given the incestuous, not to say wimpy, nature of this particular group of public employees with its joined-at-the-hip relationship to the even wimpier, rich guy dominated NorthCoast Democrat Party machinery.

And based on his handling of this and prior budgets, there's not much chance that Mendocino's incompetent County Administrator and his captive supervisors are going to do anything remotely controversial about the current budget squeeze. They'll lop off low-level workers without costing themselves so much as a penny of their own dick-off money.

Typical of the Supervisors' irresponsibility in budget matters, just last week the Supes quietly approved an enormous $11k-plus per year raise for a clerk in their own office. This substantial and self-serving expenditure was buried on their consent calendar and not voted on as an individual item.

Finally there's DA Norm Vroman's provocative May 21st challenge to his fellow managers which won't make him any friends in the County's Admin Center. If Vroman's modest challenge was applied to the county's top 100 administrators for just this year, upwards of half a million would be immediately saved without impact on any county services.

* * *

(May 20, 2004)

Dear Chairman Wagenet:

I have been giving consideration on how best to assist in reduction of county costs without loss of service to the public. The greatest cost of county operations is the salaries of personnel. Since salaries for management employees are much higher than those of the workers, reductions in cost should begin at the top. The employees who can least afford pay cuts or work furloughs are the workers.

The management of our office believes strongly enough about this that we are offering to work one day a month without pay for the next fiscal year. Beside myself, this includes Myron Sawicki, Rick Martin and Al Roman. This would be the equivalent of laying off one of my support staff for six months and still have us at work performing our duties.

We challenge other department heads and management personnel in this county to follow our lead and adopt the same principles to take the burden off the backs of the workers. It is time for all of our leaders to make personal sacrifices. Recently, most department heads received substantial salary increases in amounts almost equal to annual salaries of some employees. We must now demonstrate leadership by example while expressing appreciation and job security to our employees by our actions.

Respectfully,
Norman L. Vroman, District Attorney