I don’t believe that my small town, Whitewater, Wisconsin, needs to outsource everything. I do think that we have too many leaders in the city.
Reductions in number or compensation, if any, should begin at the very top.
It’s simply absurd for a small city’s principal bureaucrat to have his own bureaucrat to assist him. The municipal manager of a small town of only fourteen thousand should be able to manage the place on his own. It’s not, after all, a particularly big operation.
If the job’s that hard for someone, the problem lies with the job-holder and not the job. (That includes leaders’ sundry, wasteful preoccupations with big-ticket public projects.)
One of the problems in Whitewater is that bureaucrats and politicians grab headlines for themselves, while alternately ignoring and bullying frontline employees.
I’ll propose cuts to the municipal budget during budget season in the fall. For now, here’s a post about how Maywood, California was able to make cuts through outsourcing of tasks. (The article also links to an earlier story about Sandy Springs, Georgia.)