• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1154 0

and fire departments. Both cops and firemen, for instance, receive unlimited sick days. Yet in 1977 cops were averaging 16.5 days sick and firemen only 7. Why the difference? Because, unlike Police Commissioner Codd, Fire Commissioner O’Hagan—the same man who asked for a disability pension—personally monitored the performance of his department’s fourteen doctors. If reports showed they were permitting too many “sick days,” the good doctors were summoned to the Commissioner’s office. “He’s not loved,” said Oberst. “But, boy, is he good.” If all commissioners were as demanding, he said, the city could save $30 million in reduced absenteeism and overtime costs.

Good management could also help to save neighborhoods. After the blackout looting in Bushwick, I visited Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn. A solid row of attached wooden houses, with neat gardens in front, stretched for a whole block. Except for three burned-out hulks on the corner. This was a black working-class block, and worried members of the Granite Block Association complained that despite their fervent protests the hulks remained. They could get no one in the city government to tear them down or cement them shut. Neglected, they remained invitations to arson. In a flash, their dream of owning a home could vanish. Because the city did not act, members stayed home from work, took turns patrolling their block night and day. But how long would they persist before deciding, as so many others had, to flee Bushwick?

Good management is critical to the city’s economic development efforts and its hopes of squeezing savings to close budget gaps and provide raises for workers. Businesses and people look not just at city taxes but at its schools and sanitation and other services before deciding whether to move. “I agree with the unions,” declares Oberst—thinking of the 3,426,000 tons of garbage to be collected, the 6,000 miles of city streets to be policed and repaired, the 437,600 yearly false fire alarms, the 395,000 housing code violations. “The biggest problem we have is bad management. A good manager sets standards. If you play golf, par is a standard. If you have no standard, you don’t tax people to the limit of what they’re capable of doing.”

But Oberst has few illusions. He is a very neat man—three times in the course of a two-hour interview, he got up and walked the length of his gym-size office to discard, first, an empty pack of cigarettes, then a mint wrapper, then a Styrofoam coffee cup. Democratic government is never as neat. “My greatest frustration,” says this round-faced executive who looks like a construction worker, “is the inability to make things happen as fast in government as in industry. Business is much more autocratic. The President asks you to jump and you say, ‘How high?’ Government is much more democratic. There are so many constituents. There are 100 bureaucracies issuing orders in the federal government. The state has fifty bureaucracies. Then there’s the City Council, the State Legislature, the Board of Estimate, fifty-nine community planning boards—each constituency must be served.”

Managing a business and a government, the late Wallace Sayre, coauthor of Governing New York City, observed, “are alike in all unimportant respects.” Were they alike, there are limits to how far good management can take you. Even a good captain on the Titanic could not have kept the decks dry. But perhaps the captain could have steered clear of the iceberg.

Productivity

A business measures its success (or failure) by the bottom line—profits. A politician measures success by winning elections. The attempt to find a comparable bottom line by which to measure a government’s efficiency (or inefficiency) in delivering services is what productivity is supposed to mean. But productivity is a word of many meanings and nuances. In February 1977, for instance, Abe Beame didn’t seem to agree with Abe Beame about what productivity meant.

The city’s first biannual management report carried a signed introduction from the Mayor proclaiming, “In the next fiscal year it will