Labor Update and a preview of "What's Next?"

The City's General Services unit approved the salary reduction plan in a vote yesterday. They are the sixth of the City's seven labor units to approve the plan. I realize it is never easy for someone to cut their salary, but the vote demonstrates that our employees understand the difficult economic situation we are facing. I think it also demonstrates a loyalty to the co-workers who would lose their jobs if the plan were not approved.

I realize that this sort of process isn't a morale booster. However, going through this process is far better than the alternative--which would have been a slow, painful and permanent deterioration of the city's workforce and its ability to deliver service to the public. My main goal in this process was threefold. First, it was to keep up service levels to the public--this could only be done by lowering our cost of doing business. Second, it was to keep the city's most important resource intact--and that was our workers. Third and equally important--was to ensure that we maintained a work environment in which our employees could thrive both personally and professionally--which couldn't be done without an adequate workforce in place and a competitive salary.

I believe that by proposing a pay cut that was primarily focused on non-taxable income and future income, it hopefully minimized the pain to each worker. In addition, the pay cut only solves about 25 percent of this year's deficit. By tapping reserves and one-time funds, 75 percent of the deficit burden was not borne by our workers. By offering an early retirement incentive package, and by forgoing the next two COLAs, we are hoping we can make it through the next couple years of this recession without losing any more of our valuable workforce.

With this behind us, the good news is that our workforce can now find ways to work towards a better future for our employees and our residents. At last week's Management Workshop, I made a presentation on what I'd like to call "Community Based Government." In order to deal with our future budget realities of ever-increasing demands and ever-diminishing resources, I'm a firm believer that we have to give our residents a greater voice in which services government should provide through our limited resources.

I'm not saying that services should be cut, I'm saying that we need to figure out which services need to be provided by a professional workforce and which services could be provided by the citizens themselves. The only way to do this is to focus more of our energies on working with the public to find out what they need us to do and what they can do themselves.

Frankly, this is the only model that can work in the future. Our citizens don't want to be taxed to the level it would take in order for us to provide every single service that they demand. We need to help them figure out which services that they really want from us.

You'll be hearing a lot more about this in the coming weeks. All of the city's management staff will be participating in sessions to better define what "Community Based Government" will be. We are also going to be putting together a team of line staff to figure out how we would actually implement our new way of doing business.

This will not be just another task for each of us, it will be a paradigm shift in the way we work. I look forward to talking to each employee about the role that they will play in our new way of doing business. If you are interested in serving on the implementation team, please give me a call or stop by my office.