Employee Ratios

The Sacramento Bee had an interesting editorial last Sunday addressing the historical ratio of state workers per 1000 residents (click here). The editorial noted that over the past 50 years, the number of state workers has consistently been at a level of about 9 workers per 1000 residents. They seemed to defend the current staffing ratio as reasonable.

First of all, the fact that the state has nearly twice as many workers per captia as local government is appalling. Given that the state has delegated the majority of its responsibilities to state and county government, I'm still trying to determine how they justify 358,000 workers. In fact, given the state's skill in shifting its responsiblity to the rest of us, they should have far fewer workers per resident than they had 50 years ago. In addition, I would argue that many of the agencies are now automated--i.e. -- very few of us actually go into DMV to re-register our car--we do it online without any human helping us out.

Hopefully, as resources get tighter and tighter at the state level, there will finally be a day of reckoning when the majority of jobs are eliminated that are duplicative of responsibilities already delegated to other levels of government.