Commentary: City Hall is too management-heavy

The hiring binge by Costa Mesa’s administrative staff that was begun several years ago appears to be accelerating, and it needs to be contained.

It used to be that cities of our size were adequately managed by a single city manager and a single assistant city manager, supported by traditional department heads and middle managers.

In recent years, we have had a proliferation of new administrative executives. Their titles are all different, but you can identify them by their pay scale.

And they are being accompanied by a growing entourage of middle managers at somewhat lower rates. Until our rainy-day reserves, which were decimated in the past recession, are restored, Costa Mesa’s staff needs to remain lean and mean. And that is not happening.

At the last council session, announcements were made regarding new hires, with more to come.

The problem of sober-living facilities in our neighborhoods is indeed very serious, but how many people do we need to add to monitor them? If in two or three years the group homes problem is contained via ordinances, legislation or other means, what do we do with all these capable employees with their generous pension plans?

Can’t we instead transfer personnel from other departments? Has the time-honored practice of employee cross-training completely gone by the boards?

Partly because of an overreaction to the problems related to the 60th anniversary celebration, we need to continue to beef up the city clerk’s office so we can meet the ever increasing public records requests. This burgeoning need for more data is, in my opinion, a result of a lack of business experience on the part of some well-meaning citizens who don’t appreciate how large organizations, private or public, are managed.

My concern is that any potential benefits that may be obtained from trying to satisfy exaggerated needs of transparency may be more than offset by the additional costs involved. This also applies to extending COIN — the Civic Openness in Negotiations ordinance — beyond the three major employee associations to the many contracts the city enters into each year with outside parties.

Additional controls may need implementation in that area, but going off the deep end on each and every outside contract may require hiring scores of new city record keepers, not to mention the extra burden placed on staff trying to simply provide services needed by our community.

Cities always have a good reason for hiring new people, and in changing times the reasons keep changing. What doesn’t seem to change is that the bureaucracy keeps ballooning.

We need more cops patrolling our streets, not more bureaucrats in City Hall.

AL MELONE is running for Costa Mesa City Council.