The Mayor’s Office has prepared individual reports for streamlining 17 City Hall operations, but they have sat on the shelf for months because the effort has been tied to labor talks and the ongoing privatization effort, according to a recent report.
The report, from the Office of the Independent Budget Analyst, urges the Mayor’s Office to speed up these efforts so that cost savings and other improvements can be made to a wide variety of city services, such as libraries, park maintenance and streets.
The Mayor’s Office has tied the implementing of these streamlining procedures to the ongoing privatization process known as managed competition, whereby city services are placed up for bid to the private and public sector. It has kept the reports for the streamlining — known by its bureaucratic handle “business process reengineering” — private recently because of labor negotiation issues, and in order to keep the findings away from any private company that would bid on the service if it’s offered up as part of managed competition.
The first seven of the mayor’s BPR reports were completed and implemented, but since then, a number of new studies have remained, the IBA reported. The report on facilities, for example, was completed in November 2006 and the study for park maintenance was completed last month.
IBA Andrea Tevlin sympathized with the Mayor’s Office desire to keep the details of the reports from private bidders, but said the City Council should still be supplied with the basic level of service outlined in the reports so that it can ensure that any privatization effort doesn’t leave residents with a lower level of services than they had before.
“The service level you’re trying to achieve, that’s public information,” Tevlin said.
Tevlin also recommends that the studies make it to the City Council within six months of completion.
Fred Sainz, spokesman for Mayor Jerry Sanders, said the BPRs on the table “will not have any savings associated with them.” Therefore, he said, there’s no rush.
Tevlin disagreed.
“It’s hard for me to respond to that because I have seen — there are significant service level enhancements and in at least one there are significant savings,” she said.
Sainz also said that not all of the reports are complete.
“There might a difference of opinion of what completed means,” he said.