The Streets Were Paved with Gold (26 page)
Read The Streets Were Paved with Gold Online
Authors: Ken Auletta
In short, there is not likely to be a federal Santa Claus. That is why Senator Moynihan’s putative $7.4 billion “gap” is so harmful. It is a narcotic. Washington will not believe it; and the greater danger is that New Yorkers will. And if they do, they’ll be off on a crusade to right an economic wrong that may not exist—in the process, ignoring the harsh, unpleasant decisions New York has yet to make for itself.
*
The same pattern does not hold for federal mass transit capital construction funds. Over the last ten years, the New York region has received more federal construction dollars—$2 billion—than any other and ranks 6th in per capita aid.
Mismanaged New York
THE DOMED LOBBY
of the Municipal Building, across from City Hall, is still as a snapshot. The sixteen elevators stand at attention; except for the solitary guard leaning against a wall and two newsstand employees frozen in thought, the lobby’s marbled surface is as smooth and clear as a lake of ice. It stays this way from the end of the lunch hour until about 4
P.M.
, when the snapshot explodes into a motion picture. The elevators, like giant LCV’s, spring open, spilling wave after wave of city employees—clerks and computer programmers, secretaries and accountants, office boys in shirt sleeves and office managers lugging briefcases. Some pause to buy the afternoon paper. Most don’t have time, darting directly for one of the four gold spinning doors leading to the street. At 4:40
P.M.
the doors stop spinning, the newsstand begins to close. Within five minutes, they are done. “Most people who work here have left by four-thirty,” explains the woman who works at the stand.
City employees, except those few who work staggered hours, are supposed to work until 5
P.M.
Even in the Municipal Building, where they do stagger hours, many don’t work a full day. That they don’t can be blamed on employees for disobeying orders, or on their bosses for not enforcing them. Or both. No matter who’s blamed, New York City’s government—with an almost $14 billion budget matched by only one of the fifty states (California) and few nations, and a work force of 300,000, which is considerably
larger than the combined populations of the state capitals of New York and New Jersey—is a model of mismanagement. People may argue over what government should do. But those functions it does perform should be done as cheaply and efficiently as possible. That is the management challenge the city is flunking. New York is spending more and getting less, as the following suggests:
City taxpayers spend three times more than they did ten years ago to receive the
same
level of police, fire, sanitation and education services, according to the Mayor’s Temporary Commission on City Finances.
It costs about as much to educate a child in public as in private schools. The sum has risen from $500 per student in 1960 to $2,600—a jump four times greater than the consumer price index. Yet today there are only 10 percent more students, class sizes have expanded, reading scores have declined—and the number of school employees has doubled.
Between 1968 and 1977, the city’s transit system lost 22 percent if its riders but gained 384 employees, according to the business-oriented Economic Development Council.
The city has 2,000 more policemen than it had in 1961—yet in 1977 policemen worked 1 million fewer hours than they did in 1961, according to a study by Mary McCormick, former research director of the Temporary Commission.
In 1970, there was one sergeant for every eleven cops. In 1977, there were 25 percent fewer patrolmen and one sergeant for every seven cops.
Hospital services declined at the same time expenditures and the number of hospital employees multiplied. Between 1961 and 1971, the municipal-hospital system’s patient services dropped 20 percent while 4,000 new employees were hired, a study by Charles Brecher of Columbia University’s Conservation of Human Resources Project found. In the decade through 1976, the city’s health expenditures tripled, averaging $226 a day in a city hospital in 1976—70 percent above the national average.
The growth of the city’s budget has not meant a corresponding growth in taxpayers’ services. Between 1961 and 1975—after discounting inflation—city labor costs jumped three times faster than
the number of employees. More city employees are working fewer hours for a lot more money. If all city employees worked the same forty-hour week as federal or most private employees do, the Koch administration calculated, taxpayers could potentially receive 20 million extra hours of service—the equivalent of adding more than 10,000 new employees.
When set against the backdrop of New York’s fiscal crisis and economic decline, these facts seem to add up to a disaster. But they also add up to an opportunity. Since no one can deny the city is engaged in a struggle for survival, New York has the rare opportunity to alter dramatically the way government—which accounts for about one quarter of the nation’s GNP—delivers services. While it is commonly assumed that the federal government is
the
giant bureaucracy, in fact four of every five civilian government workers—12 million—are employed by state and local governments. And one of every seven American workers is on the payroll of a local government. Local government is not only our largest industry, says the National Council on Municipal Performance, it is “our least efficient.” In this sense, New York can again be a pioneer: closing its performance as well as its budget gap; figuring out how to do more for less.
Today, New York is a pioneer of another sort. Its basic management and personnel system, like a huge, immovable rock, has so far weathered the fiscal storm. Imagine beneath that unscathed rock lurks a rabbit sporting a watch in its waistcoat pocket. Follow him down the rabbit hole and enter New York City’s very own Wonderland, where you find:
City employees enjoy a 4-day work week
. According to a 1976 report from the Temporary Commission, many city employees work 210 out of a possible 261 workdays. They average 25 days’ vacation, 12 sick days, 11 holidays, half a day for death in the family, and over two days’ terminal leave. City teachers receive about 75 days off, including summer, Christmas and Easter vacations. City University professors receive about 80 days off, and a full professor, reports the Commission, is paid $33,475 for less than 11 hours a week in the classroom. Beginning sanitation men get 5 weeks’ paid vacation (private carters in the Teamsters Union get 2 weeks the first year and 5 weeks only after 15 years). The average policeman or fireman is off about 55 days a year. After three years, all uniformed employees—police, fire, sanitation, corrections officers,
Housing and Transit police—receive 27 days vacation. In addition, cops, corrections officers, Housing and Transit police get another 8 chart days off in return for an extra 15 minutes spent each workday on paperwork and checking in and out. (They won an additional 6 chart days in the 1978 labor negotiations.) Sergeants do even better, receiving 18 to 28 chart days off. The Emergency Financial Control Board has reported that the reduction of sergeants’ chart days off to 8 would be equivalent to adding 256 sergeants to the police force. If there were no chart days for patrolmen, the Police Department has said, the extra coverage would be equivalent to adding 900 cops. If the city followed the same annual leave policies as the state, noted the Temporary Commission, over the next 25 years it could save almost $2 billion.