We hope Hamilton County commissioners will rescind or rethink the resolution they passed last week that seeks to set up a civil service system for some county employees.
The commission, with little discussion, unanimously passed a measure that would set up a system in which some employees would have extra job protections and whose dismissals first would have to go through a civil service commission or board.
The resolution was one of five the commission passed quickly in light of the recent dismissal by Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp of longtime county attorney Rheubin Taylor.
However, the civil service resolution exempts the county attorney, positions in the mayor’s office and department administrators. Yet, the county attorney’s job — plus a vague, unspecified apprehension of work culture in county government — was the only one whose status was a concern of commissioners. And commissioners voted in a separate resolution to allow the county attorney to serve out his contract, which ends in 2024.
This is the type of system that has has made it so difficult to fire bad employees in state and large city governments. Indeed, the United States federal civil service system has perpetrated what has become known derisively in Washington, D.C., as “The Swamp,” where unelected bureaucrats stay on for presidential administration after presidential administration, gumming up the works for those who want to put governmental reforms in place.
A Hamilton County “swamp” is the last thing our county government needs.
Civil service began the late 1870s when New York City and Brooklyn passed needed measures to protect against the often corrupt patronage or “spoils” system of government which rewarded supporters of elected officials with jobs.
Over the years, though, such a system has come under criticism, including for the overall weakening of the caliber of employees, the lessening of accountability and the diminution of results.
Consider the conclusions of two authors on the subject of civil service, as cited in a Tennessee Municipal Technical Advisory Service publication:
› “The culture of public management,” wrote Walter Olson in a City Journal article titled “Fixing the Civil Service Mess,” “takes it for granted that employees in effect ‘own’ their jobs as long as those jobs continue in existence. Public managers have resigned themselves to the entrenchment of incompetents and shirkers at every level, as a necessary evil of government service.”
› “There’s an old saying: ‘Government workers are like headless nails: you can get them in but you can’t get them out,'” David Osborne and Ted Gaebler point out in their paper “Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector.” “The process of (dismissal) is so time consuming and difficult that few managers ever fire anyone. Instead managers tolerate incompetents, transfer them, or bump them upstairs.”
Does Hamilton County really want anything that resembles that system?
While we didn’t necessarily agree with Wamp’s decision to fire Taylor without the advice and consent of the commission, we do believe it makes sense to tailor the county attorney’s contract to that of the county mayor.
However, the mayor believes it was lawful for him to take the step he did — that the county’s attorney’s contract effectively ended with the inauguration of a new mayor. Courts, as we pointed out last week, may have to have the last word in the matter.
But we certainly don’t see Wamp wanting to reach down below the administrator level of county government and start firing people, which are the employees a civil service system would protect.
The mayor, for his part, called the resolution “insane” and a “complete disaster,” alleged that department heads didn’t want such a system, and said “we have a personnel issue with one person.”
“Nothing would degrade the quality of the professional life of the county’s department heads like a move to civil service,” Wamp told the Times Free Press last week.
He said he also heard from multiple commissioners who apparently didn’t realize what they were voting for and wanted to revisit the measure.
“I believe that as the more conservative members of the commission understand what happened, they’ll realize that this was a ploy from the single left-wing member of the commission,” the mayor said.
He was referring to David Sharpe, who introduced the civil service resolution last week.
No matter who proposed the resolution, we think it’s worrisome that commissioners would immediately vote up or down on such a issue without taking the time necessary to study it.
That said, we would urge commissioners to tread carefully. Adopting a civil service system is a step we believe commissioners would regret if they were to take it. We hope they’ll rescind the resolution or rethink the issue entirely this week.