The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [108]
“There is yet no measure of what each department should be doing,” complained a former Lindsay administration official who worked for Beame in 1977. The city’s productivity program measures the total tonnage of garbage collected, says former Sanitation Commissioner Martin Lang, “but what counts is the per-man tonnage.” What also counts is whether the streets are clean. The Productivity Council offered one grievous example of the city’s propensity to quantify rather than qualify results: the Office of Code Enforcement, they found, claimed its productivity improved because building inspections per inspector were up from six to eight per day. “Yet the statistic itself is meaningless—the question is what happens as a result of these inspections? Is there a follow-up visit to see if violations have been corrected? If they have not been attended to, is the landlord properly punished? When a landlord cannot immediately be located, are efforts made to track him down? In other words, how many of the inspectorial visits actually result in building improvements?”
There are other obstacles facing the city’s productivity efforts, some self-imposed, others inherent. To win peace and forge a partnership with its municipal unions, the Beame administration agreed to forgo selective layoffs and substitute a policy of encouraging people to retire early (attrition). The city and unions were implicitly agreeing the work force was too large but would be reduced randomly, as 25,000 earlier layoffs were randomly made on the basis of seniority—last hired, first fired. (A 1976 report by the City Commission on Human Rights revealed that this layoff policy wiped out half of all Hispanic employees and 35 percent of all black employees; 33 percent of those terminated were female, as opposed to 22 percent white males.) The city’s attrition policy was “insidious,” said then Parks Commissioner Martin Lang, who nevertheless presided over a declining department. “An organization that has no influx of new people is doomed. An agency can’t be preserved like a fly in amber. The average age of my field force is fifty-six. All city departments must be dynamic. The Parks Department is dying.”
Productivity efforts raise still other problems. The government’s measure of productivity improvement may not be the same as the public’s. Lang, for instance, was proud of having introduced “mobile crews” traveling from park to park to clean up, replacing stationary crews who simply remained in one park. More parks got cleaned. But the public complained they were being abandoned because they were more concerned with safety and the presence of a uniformed employee than with cleanliness.
Equipment breakdowns hinder productivity. The Sanitation Department’s 1976 management plan predicted that 43 percent of their mechanical sweepers would be out of service at any one time. Actually, 52 percent were. Other unanticipated problems arise. The Medical Examiner’s Office found that the attrition policy was too successful—their staff was 30 percent below budget. The Corrections Department exceeded their overtime spending goal by 24 percent, but blamed unanticipated prison riots. Some city agencies even complained that the increased paperwork required by the productivity program reduced productivity. The October 1976 Department of Consumer Affairs report apologized that its Enforcement