Workers Give Mayor a Wealth of Ideas

Things didn’t exactly go according to plan in recognizing the 25 most innovative city employees in Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan’s war on waste and treasury deficits.

Their ideas did not show up as expected in the coming fiscal year’s mayoral budget proposal, already undergoing testy City Council hearings. They still don’t know who will get lunch with Riordan--the reward for the winner of the money-saving contest his budget staff launched in late February.

Even their session Thursday morning with the mayor was rushed, with Riordan, already running late on a tight schedule, alternating his enthusiastic comments on the ideas with admonishments to be brief in discussing their suggestions.

“I’m really impressed,” Riordan said in wrapping up the one-hour meeting in the richly paneled conference room normally used for news conferences and receptions. “These ideas are incredibly creative.”

The ideas also came free of charge, unless you insist on counting whatever taxpayers’ time employees may have spent thinking them up. Sanitation Bureau employee Michael J. Fennessey, for instance, proposed having departments with their own costly, seldom-used heavy equipment set up a citywide system of sharing and renting; a private consultant recently came up with a similar idea, one of several recommendations of a study that cost taxpayers $300,000.

A few of the finalists showed that they are in sync with the administration by using phrases that could have come right out of the venture capitalist-turned-mayor’s stump speeches: “borrowing lessons from private industry” and “the entrepreneurial spirit.”

But Donald Whitmore of the Department of General Services, whose proposal to consolidate various city purchasing offices into one centralized system earned him a chair at the meeting, said he questioned the administration’s frequent use of private consultants--at last count, in 111 projects totaling $81 million.

Riordan replied that many of the past consulting contracts were nothing more than “a lot of pork barrels,” but defended the practice of hiring outsiders to analyze city operations as “very valuable . . . to make systemic changes.”

Some suggestions are likely to encounter resistance from public employee unions or at least rankle the innovator’s co-workers. “Time clocks and tougher supervisors” were city clerk’s worker Laurie L. Sandino-Velesquez’s pointed ideas for improving productivity.

“Good!” responded the mayor. “Sometimes the biggest ideas are the simplest.”

Lemono V. Lott of the Public Works Department’s Engineering Bureau had an idea that isn’t likely to sit too well with court officials. He proposed limiting city-paid jury service to five days.

The city now pays for 10 days but the limit comes off when an employee gets selected for a trial that runs longer. Long Beach recently adopted a five-day policy and has cut its tab by almost 50%, Lott added.

Riordan had an answer for the tough-sell proposals--he promised to hold another contest to those innovators who find ways to get their ideas into practice.

“Call my office; we’ll help you,” he promised.

The mayor said he was not bothered by the time constraints that kept the finalists’ ideas from getting into this year’s budget.

“I don’t look at this in the context of the budget, except in the long term,” Riordan said.

Noticeably absent from the list was the proposal from the anonymous city employee who said his job should be eliminated altogether because he had little to do at work but read the newspaper.

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Shrinking City Hall

Here are some of the ideas of the 25 finalists in Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan’s contest to find the best suggestions for saving money and improving efficiency.

* Buy private $50-a-year automobile club memberships for city fleet cars, providing each vehicle that breaks down on the road with cheaper, speedier service than the city provides now.

* Set up office computers for instant printing of city forms and letterhead documents, eliminating ordering delays and the need for warehouse space and workers.

* Switch the 24-hour shifts of highly paid assistant fire chiefs in division offices to regular eight-hour business days to do their largely administrative work.

* Set up a single payroll processing system for the Department of Public Works, which has separate systems for each bureau.

* Cut the number of middle-management and supervisory jobs and add to the corps of lower paid workers who provide city services.

* Allow field inspectors for business permits and licenses to issue citations on the spot instead of requiring them to bring their reports back to an office for staff to produce citations

* Allow nonsworn detention officers to transport low-risk jail inmates, freeing up police officers.

* Reduce the number of city-owned cars issued to employees who are allowed to take them home.

* Combine the separate construction crews of the two main branches of the Department of Water and Power

* Reduce the amount of paid sick time employees take by paying them for a portion of unused days or allowing them to carry some of them into the next year.

Source: Mayor’s budget team