Twenty five years after just running around on a soccer pitch Sunday morning with county employees and after years of working closely with county departments and listening constantly to words like “can’t” “why bother” and other such terms that aren’t conducive to meaningful change, I have ideas for Pete Kutras on how to shave money from the county budget this year, and it’s not looking at non-mandated service, because the preponderance of evidence shows that if county residents don’t have access to many of the non-mandated services, we will have more people clogging the mandated systems: county emergency rooms and jails, and the streets.
Contrary to what many county higher ups claim, it hasn’t cut all the fat it could. If the county wants to save money, it’s really time to jettison the dead weight, and I’m talking about those County Employees (capital C, capital E), the ones who have had petitions by other co-workers not to work with him/her. They are the folks who got a county job, knowing they wouldn’t have to work hard and they’d still get great benefits (I just worked with one, and we were so relieved when she found a job she really wanted in another part of the county. Now she can remind THEM that she is entitled to an hour lunch and be unable to do what’s needed and be unproductive there.)
These folks are unfair to the absolutely dedicated angels who give their hearts and souls to their work. Why not help those workers and recognize there are far too many people simply taking up space and not pulling their weight? Mid-level managers have complained for years about not being able to let those chronically underperforming employees go, while not able to reward the good workers who work harder because of the dead weight.
Just how expensive is it to let go of someone who is a chronic underperformer? Surely it can’t be more in the long run than cutting critical services that will cause more expensive acute care? I’ve heard story after story about how managers “can’t change that.” Can’t change what, exactly? Then you want another bond or parcel tax passed? C’mon! Remember, bond failures are not about taxpayers not wanting to pay for essential services. They are about the county leaders and employee unions breaking faith with taxpayers; one gives away the store, and the other stands there with the bag open.
Here’s another place for Mr. Kutras to cut, but to find it, he needs to do a bit of graphing, working backward from the expensive acute care systems, like emergency psychiatric services, hospital emergency wards, jails, and homeless services. For example, take an individual in the Department of Mental Health’s most expensive care and backtrack his path how he got there and started costing the county $600 a day. He will most likely find ways that the system is set up to keep people out of less expensive preventive care. A total of $8,400 for two weeks of intensive acute care doesn’t seem like a lot, but it sure as heck does when that’s the cost of a part of a case manager who would check in with that individual for a year, making sure he was making his appointments and taking his medication on a regular basis and be a stable contributing member of our community. Instead, they are hospitalized and traumatized due to lack of care, setting them back for months, and sometimes years.
In every domain for which the county is responsible, there is waste because of the inability to cut across systems and talk to each other and creating seamless and coordinated systems of care, and instead, growing a service flow path that looks like the snakes on Medusa’s head because each department focuses instead on the demands of state and federal regulations and avoiding union displeasure.
I disagree that nothing can be changed. Instead, I see people giving in to fear and abandoning what a friend calls “a hopeful imagination.”
Here’s what I suggest. Included in performance reviews, which should include customer satisfaction, county workers should be evaluated on their answer to the question: “are you on board for change that will be meaningful and effective, and will you do your part to make it happen?” (Very important follow-up piece, that is). If it isn’t an unequivocal, enthusiastic yes to both parts of that question, then management should recommend strongly that the county employee retire and help them to do so, if needed.
Columnist Dina Campeau is a wife, mother of two teens and a resident of Morgan Hill. Her work for the last seven years has focused on affordable housing and homeless issues in Santa Clara County. Her column will be published each Friday. Reach her at
dc******@ch*****.net
.
