There are some things that are simply too evasive for the mind of mortal man to comprehend.

One is getting the same enrollment number from Memphis City Schools two times in a row, and now, we can add the number of employees in city government.

The FY 2012 budget submitted by the Division of Finance to Memphis City Council said that city government had 6,320 employees and 6,636 authorized jobs.  Last week, the Division of Human Resources said that city government has 7,726 employees. The Commercial Appeal data center says city government has 7,211 salaried employees.  Meanwhile, others in city government put the number at 8,417 employees.

Blizzard of Numbers

It’s all enough to make your head spin and provides more than enough fodder for talk radio to draw all kind of faulty inferences, such as the conclusion that the workforce of city government has swelled in recent years with thousands of new employees. It’s easy to forgive the confusion, given that there are a variety of employee categories. There are “regular employees” and temporary employees.  There are employees paid from the general fund and employees paid from grant funds.  There are jobs that are filled and jobs that are vacant.

Because of it, to use a favorite bureaucratic phrase, comparisons are often apples and oranges.  One time, the employment numbers are only about one category of employees and the next time it includes seasonal workers.  That said, the dizzying array of employee numbers has caused some ripples in the news media and confuses the public at a time when layoffs are taking place as part of the compromise budget for 2011-2012.  If the employee number is the highest one – 8,417 – it’s easy to see 114 layoffs as imminently manageable.

Of course, the budget also eliminates 248 vacant positions, so the total impact on city jobs is 362, or 4 percent.  If the number is the lowest number, the layoff and job eliminations amount to 6 percent.  Either way, it’s unlikely for the public to see this as creating a hardship for city government, and more fundamentally, it’s a rare member of the public who sees government’s role as job generator.

A Better Way

Hopefully, however, the elimination of vacant jobs is not just about wherever they happen to be found, but are targeted to low-priority areas.  We’ve written our criticisms before about the fallacies of across-the-board funding cuts, and the same goes for the capricious nature of eliminating job vacancies.  They may be in areas that deserve and need the worker, so we’re hoping that these decisions are more strategic in nature.

Speaking of confusion in City Hall, there was the discussion this week about an imminently reasonable ordinance requiring the city administration and City Council to pass a five-year strategic plan and consolidated budget (“consolidated” meaning that it will include both the capital budget and the operating budget).  Proposed by Councilman Kemp Conrad, the intent is to require city government to think more strategically about revenues and expenditures over a longer period of time.

Today, city government’s budget process includes projections five years into the future, but this analysis is not as rigorous as it should be if city officials are to disrupt the now annual budgetary conflicts that pass for budget deliberations.  As we’ve written for years, city government’s flawed business and its structural problems are such that this year’s budget process will become a yearly feature of city government unless more emphasis is given to the long-term picture.

Ending the Era of Band-aids

Today, the emphasis is all about solving the budget hurdles directly in front of city officials.  Because of it, solutions tend toward band-aids to stop the bleeding while the symptoms of the hemorrhage remain unchecked.  A number of cities already use multi-year budgeting and use the process to develop strong and realistic economic forecasts, scenarios for tax revenues based on those forecasts, and research-based predictions on the major tax sources for City of Memphis – property taxes and sales taxes.

One is centered on vacancy rates, foreclosures, and residential trends, and the other is centered on consumer consumption.  Both are subject to severe disruptions and without information like the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ report that said it would be the first quarter, 2016, before our pre-recession regional employment levels, current projections tend to optimism and the extension of existing trends.

In the end, the ordinance on the five-year plan was referred to the next meeting of the executive committee after a rambling discussion that rarely touched on the actual agenda item but showed a lingering feeling of buyer’s remorse by a number of Council members, notably Wanda Halbert.

Compromise Can Hurt

She said: “It’s also a failure on the council, myself included, to allow what recently happened to happen.  We literally sat in that meeting where I think people were putting forth items that we were hearing for the very first time … with no documentation. That’s an indictment on the council. We never should have allowed that to happen.”  Meanwhile, Councilman Joe Brown said that next year, the Council needs its own CPA because the administration is outsmarting Council members.

The lingering criticism and suspicions by some Council members seems the political equivalent of buyer’s remorse, but that’s the fundamental nature of compromise budgets.  There’s something for every one to hate.

While the budget hearings were painful, the fact that various Council members used the word “compromise” to describe it indicated the give and take that was part and parcel of this year’s process.  It also ensured that every Council member in the end voted to approve a budget that included something they found objectionable.

It’s easy to see the need for compromise in City Hall in the midst of hard budget deliberations, but it’s not easy, or comfortable, to explain it to constituents complaining back in the district about a decision made in the process.

The five-year strategic plan was one of the “best practices” identified by last year’s Metropolitan Charter Commission, and this fact alone was enough to give some Council members pause.  That said, it’s a good concept, bringing discipline and long-term thinking to the budgeting process.  Hopefully, next time, it will receive the consideration it deserves.