Deputy city manager simply doesn’t make sense
To the editor:
I read with dismay in the Nov. 2 Star-Herald, the list of possible budget cuts that the city manager had drawn up for the City Council to consider.
Conspicuously absent from his list was the newly created (and not yet filled) post of deputy city manager, a position which the City Council has (curiously, given all of the talk of austerity) just recently authorized. Why on earth would the City Council contemplate laying off police officers, firefighters, or recreational staff, while at the same time adding a second, very highly paid, supervisor?
This decision is wrong, for several reasons. Organizations everywhere are downsizing, but the way they create efficiencies is by reducing the number of supervisors, not adding to them. Managers are made to supervise more employees, and every available dollar is pushed down to the rank and file workers who actually provide services to people. Our city government is about to do the opposite — pad the supervisory ranks while letting the actual doers struggle with chronic under-manning.
The city manager is reported to have lamented that further budget cuts would hurt morale among city workers. Happily, this would not be a problem for this position, because no one is yet occupying it. And Mr. Bennett has an impressive record of public service, having run a city government far larger than ours. Surely he is capable of running the Star City without a deputy.
I’m not much of an expert in city government, so I don’t know what a deputy city manager would actually do. But I have a pretty good idea of what he wouldn’t be doing. He wouldn’t be coaching my kids’ recreational soccer games, or guarding their lives at the indoor pool, or pulling over speeders near their playground, or running into a burning house to rescue them from a second-story bedroom.
So let’s keep all of the people that do that for us, and not worry about hiring someone whose job it will be to run around telling them what to do.
Brent Anderson
Presque Isle
