Agenda - Council - 12/22/1981 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

or~ng arter PART OF A SERIES Without moving from the driver's seat, Phoenix sanitation man Leonard McDade pulls up 1o a 90-galhm garbage container, grabs it with the truck's mechanical arms, and dumps the contents. One man with a mechanized side-loader can pick up as much garbage as Ihree men used to. Phoe- nix has cut the sanilation force by 63% and saves $3 million a year. One-man crews get 11% extra pay. ! ~aking bureaucracy more effective "~s tou, gh, but some rare successes prove- ~t can be done. Why_.-Government - Works Dumb ly JEREMY MAIN ~Politics and productivity don't seem to ~mix. Politicians denounce waste and mis- '"'management but, once elected, usually appear incapable of improving govern- .nent effectiveness. It's a pity, because the creases in productivity achieved by Ja- pan and by the best-managed U.S. com- oanies, if applied to government, would eliver huge savings to the taxpayer. The int Economic Committee of Congress figured in 1979 that a 10% improvement lin the output of the nation's 2.8 million federal workers would lop $8 billion out of the budget--without reducing services. · Research associate: Anna Cifelli 146 FORTUNE A~t.~O, ~9a~ Like Proposition 13 in California, Ronald Reagan's unprecedented budget cuts will prod civil servants to do more with less. But wholesale reductions alone are not enough and sometimes hurt. To achieve short-run economies, govern- ment' officials often eliminate the capital investments, maintenance, planning, and' training that would improve performance in the long run. In its fiscal crisis of 1975, for instance, New York City chopped deeply into maintenance and capital spending, accelerating a deteri- oration in plant that has sapped .services and productivity. Reagan's knife is slicing i~to the Of- fice of Personnel Management's efforts to organize a federal productivity drive-- meager as those efforts have been in the past. As business has discovered, pro- ductivity campaigns aren't likely to catch on without a firm commitment from the chief executive. Although a few state and local governments have put together successful productivity programs, Rea- gan, like his predecessors, has not yet shown interest in adopting a compre- hensive system that sets goals, measures results, and rewards performance. Here and there--in Phoenix, iri North