Thinking Smarter About Village Workforce

In the run up to the 2014 Patchogue Village Budget here are some more common sense ideas about how to reduce taxes by reducing costs over the long term. And a puzzle I am hoping the public will help me try and solve.

One…let them go!. One historic tool that Patchogue Village has not yet put to use is to offer a retirement incentive to its staff. We do have staff making some high pay after years of loyal service. As staff stay on they cost more and their retirements cost more too. One way out: offer a cash incentive to encourage staff that is holding on until they reach retirement age to leave early. Incentives of this kind usually are offered on a basis of a thousand dollars for each year of service. Taking higher paid staff off the payroll and replacing them with lower paid staff is the first saving. The second saving is that new staff would be hired on the latest tier which is the least expensive tier these days reducing long term obligations for tax payers over time.

Two: let them speak up! Another idea would be to encourage staff to suggest savings and perhaps even provide cash rewards for good ideas. As smart as managers may be no one is smarter than the regular rank and file employees who have the most direct view about how work can be done cheaper and more efficiently. They just have to be heard. The village should adopt a program to encourage staff to come forward with cost cutting ideas. It must also too guarantee that no one doing so would in any way be retaliated against if for example a suggestion arose stepping on the toes of anyone who might be attached to some policy or program that may be politically important but wasteful. Whistle blower protection laws would have to be in place. And why not? The highest cause is loyalty to the tax payers not a boss, or manager of whatever title or it ought to be.  The village should commit to that cause by enacting the best program of this kind possible with the highest protections and incentives for regular workers to be a part of it.

Lastly rational planning in terms of existing staff would also seem to be needed these days. Fact: the Village treasurer is paid around 30,000 dollars a year and manages more than twelve million dollars of village funds every year. Fact:  the Village is currently advertising for an assistant code enforcement supervisor part time, twenty hours a week at a salary of 46,000. Puzzle: when you compare these two titles how are the various duties and pay scales in any way in balance?  If patronage is the answer then isn’t what is really being claimed when it is said that a two percent tax cap is unreachable is this: it is unreachable because there are other political priorities more important that need to be protected?