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By Root 1164 0

Environmental Protection Administrator Jerome Kretchmer, reacting to a Citizens Budget Commission study that claimed the city could save up to $77 million by contracting out sanitation services, proposed an experiment on February 6, 1972. That was the year Lindsay was running for President, and it was never undertaken. Sanitation Commissioner Martin Lang also proposed an experiment in 1975. Three months after offering the job, and under pressure from the sanitation union, Beame abruptly invited Lang to become Parks Commissioner. As a candidate for mayor, Ed Koch pledged to initiate such a program. Yet six months after he became mayor, Carol Bellamy, President of the City Council, chided Koch for appropriating “no funds to the Sanitation Department for such activities.” Koch, after he was elected, conferred with sanitation union consultant Jack Bigel about his choice for commissioner. Koch intended to appoint the first choice of his search committee, Nathan Leventhal, an outsider presumably open to experiments. When Bigel huffed, Koch backed off and reappointed Anthony T. Vaccarello, a lovely man but also no boat-rocker. As an added pacifier, Koch anointed Frank Sisto, President of the Sanitation Officers union, as First Deputy Commissioner.

Koch seemed to be impersonating Beame. Vaccarello and Sisto won the confidence of their men, but in the first six months did little to change the way sanitation services were delivered. (By October 1978, Koch had a new commissioner.) In a June interview, Koch defended the glacial pace of government reforms: “Look, we haven’t had a chance to govern. For five and one-half months we’ve been going from abyss to abyss.” Crisis to crisis. Because of this, he said, he had not been able to focus on his director of operations’ conclusion that sanitation services could be improved by 10 percent with the introduction of two rather than three men to a truck, a practice followed by most cities. The sanitation union has traditionally opposed this practice, but since it is not prohibited by their contract the city could unilaterally begin such operations in many districts. That it didn’t was a management failure. All Koch had to do was give the policy go-ahead for his commissioner to proceed. Koch was offering an excuse, not an explanation—or at least not a very good one. A mayor is supposed to delegate authority and responsibility to his commissioners.

Koch was copping a plea, something Beame did when he ignored the recommendation of the Temporary Commission on City Finances that $100 million could be saved in the Police Department alone through better management; something labor leaders do when they caution that change must come slowly or it will further undermine “worker morale”; something management and labor have both done while ignoring proposals to farm out the delivery of some city services to worker cooperatives, permitting workers and taxpayers to share in the savings. Such cooperatives, which admittedly would alter the concept of public service as a sacrifice of sorts, would work in the following way: Assume it now costs $10 million to provide sanitation services in one district. The city would provide the worker co-op with $8 million to do the job, a $2 million saving for the taxpayers. If the co-op could perform the work for less than $8 million, it would get to keep, say, 50 percent of the difference. The worker thus has an incentive to improve productivity, to work harder, and the taxpayer saves money and receives improved services. As is the case with contracting out to private firms, which could go on simultaneously, competition would have been introduced to a moribund bureaucracy. Yet despite an agreement in 1976 to experiment with worker co-ops in the sanitation department (called gainsharing), by mid-1978 the plan remained on the shelf.*

But neither the city nor its workers has the luxury of time. As the taxpayer revolt of the late seventies demonstrates, government will either reform itself or taxpayers will force it to. With a lagging economy, the best way to ensure future worker