Despite Push-back by City Council, Residents and Municipal Workers’ Union, Mayor Gloria Wins Fight Over Middle Managers

Todd Gloria, mayor of San Diego, appears to have won the recent round on the city budget with both the City Council and the Municipal Employees Association — who represents most of the city’s workforce. Gloria refused to fire any of the hundreds of so-called “middle managers” in order to fill in the $350 million deficit — something the Council and MEA — and public — wanted.

Voice of San Diego reported:

Mayor Todd Gloria and his office are making clear none of their employees are on the chopping block.

Mayoral spokesperson Rachel Laing stated:

“As noted by the City Attorney’s Office, the Mayor alone is responsible for making decisions for his office, which includes the City’s executive team and other mayoral departments.”

Laing “added that the mayor will continue to make staffing decisions based on what the mayor thinks is needed to run a responsive and effective city government,” says the Voice.

The plight of middle managers became an issue in discussions during “controversial budget negotiations this spring” — which “pitted Mayor Todd Gloria against city labor leaders — and eventually most of the City Council,” reports David Garrick of the San Diego U-T.

And we have to add that members of the public at large — city residents — also chimed in about doing away with the many managerial positions the city has, especially faced with the drastic budget measures that Gloria offered: cutting hundreds (300) of front-line city workers — city librarians, rec workers and parks maintenance staff. The Rag, for instance, called for “cutting positions, not programs.”

The Voice summed up the process:

As part of the new fiscal budget this year, the City Council made the unprecedented move of cutting specific jobs from the mayor’s staff to help address the looming $350 million deficit. The Council specifically cut two employees from the communications department, two deputy chief operating officers, and two management roles in the police and compliance departments.

After a tense back and forth that included a mayoral veto, the Council managed to include the final staff cuts in the budget approved on July 1. Voice learned the mayor decided not to fire anyone.

Labor leaders, city residents and ultimately many councilmembers wanted sharp cuts to middle management positions so the city could lay off fewer front-line workers in its effort to close the gaping deficit.

Yet, during the process, we did learn some invaluable facts and figures about the middle managers.

• MEA says there are more than five times as many high-paid middle managers known as “program coordinators” and “program managers” at the city as there were a decade ago.
• During that same time, the MEA says, the overall city workforce has grown by only 20% — making middle managers a significantly larger portion of the city’s 13,000 employees.
• the number of such jobs at the city, which typically pay between $200,000 and $250,000, has skyrocketed since fiscal year 2015 from 70 to 393 — up 461%. And the pace of the increase has accelerated, with more than 100 of those 393 positions created since fiscal 2023, according to the MEA.
• Nearly all of the city’s middle management jobs are unclassified, meaning they are not part of the civil service system and the people in those jobs are not represented by a labor union.

“They love those positions,” Michael Zucchet, head of MEA and a former councilmember himself, said of the mayor’s staff and city department heads. “You get to hire whoever you want, you don’t have to deal with any pesky rules, you get to pay them twice as much as you’d pay a classified employee and there’s not a lot of transparency as to what goes on with these positions.”

Now, Gloria and his staff fought back against the criticisms of the middle managers. Garrick:

“they released a new study in May finding that middle managers make up a smaller percentage of city staff in San Diego than in most other large cities they analyzed. According to their study, 8% of San Diego’s workforce are middle managers — a bigger share than in San Jose, Los Angeles and New York but smaller than in Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Chicago and Austin.”

Gloria’s staff also says the rise in such jobs has been necessary as the city has tackled more complex issues, expanded resident services and had to comply with more state and federal mandates, as Garrick repeated.

Zucchet responded by critiquing that study’s finding that San Diego has comparatively few middle managers, contending the study is skewed by the comparison cities it uses, as reported by the U-T. Zucchet cited “cities in Texas and Arizona have more unclassified jobs because municipal labor unions are less powerful in those states, but not all those jobs are middle management, he said. “We’re talking apples and oranges here,” he added.

He said the two most comparable cities to San Diego in the study, Los Angeles and San Jose, both employ significantly lower shares of middle managers — 6% in San Jose and 4% in L.A., compared to San Diego’s 8%. “You could look at this study and say San Diego has twice as many as L.A. and 33% more than San Jose,” he said.

He pointed out that the mayor’s initial draft budget in April had proposed cutting 300 front-line positions, including librarians and recreation center assistant directors, and only one middle management position.

Despite Gloria winning this round, Garrick of the UT believes this fight “over how many middle managers the city employs could signal the start of a shift away from such jobs in the future, after years of their ranks quickly growing.”

Zucchet of the MEA is more optimistic. Just recently he said that the council’s actions and the increased attention the council is giving to middle management jobs is still an important and fundamental change.

“It’s an unmistakable, seismic shift,” said Zucchet, praising other members for joining longtime middle-management critic Councilmember Vivian Moreno. “I think the level of scrutiny from the council will be much different — from the whole council, not just Councilmember Moreno.”

Here’s more details from Garrick:

The dispute over middle managers culminated last month with City Council members lobbying for cuts to those positions and eventually making some cuts themselves despite objections — and a formal veto — from Gloria.

The council cut two management jobs in the Communications Department and eliminated two of the city’s five deputy chief operating officer positions in a compromise budget it approved 7-2 on June 10.

It then reiterated its desire to cut those jobs when it overrode Gloria’s line-item veto, which had sought to restore all of those middle management jobs, in a 6-3 vote on June 23.

Gloria has so far declined to eliminate any of those management positions, even though the new fiscal year that the budget covers began July 1. A spokesperson said the mayor does not plan to cut any positions or make any personnel decisions at the direction of the council.

Sources:

San Diego U-T

Voice of San Diego