By Jim Varnadore
Now that we’ve begun making sense of the trash fees and the hateful parking fees at Balboa Park, you might give sober consideration to the suggestions your constituents sent you for bringing city expenses down to match its income.
One very helpful suggestion is to cut your personal staffs in half, eliminating the higher paid half but not increasing the lower paid half – neither numbers nor pay. Your constituents would no longer pay staff members whose main job is to win your next election.
A similarly helpful suggestion is to eliminate all deputy department head and assistant department head positions. The incumbents would not leave city employment; rather, they would trickle-down to take lower positions. That would leave leaner departments and department heads in closer touch with the departments and their functioning. It would advance good governance.
As a last-but-not-least change, you should eliminate the staff position you created to work your social media accounts. You created the position, hired an incumbent, and set the compensation somewhere above $ half a million per year when retirement, holidays, medical, and other fringe benefits are calculated; and all that just for fiddling with a smart phone.
It’s time to stop.
Jim Varnadore is a civics-activist, former chair of City Heights Community Planning Group, and a resident of City Heights.
This is spot on.
So….today I tried to find the name of the director of the Planning Department of the City Council. Appalled, I found more than a dozen divisions of planning with all kinds of funny titles…as in dozens. Want to know how to reduce City expenses? Fire every 5th of those managers who are not protected by Civil Service. Then re-organize so the lower ranks can evenly share the work load.
First you have to get the council to show up for work. They miss a lot of days. Too bad it’s not tied to their salaries.
Layers of incompetence ?
Mandarins of power ?
Todd Squad ?
Dear OBRagOrg,
Appreciate appearing in print. Thank you. I do like Ron May’s suggestion to “quintimate” some of the city staff, and I hope the verbivore won’t speak too sternly to me for injuring his and my favorite psstime. Jim Varnadore
I take it Jim Varnadore seconds my proposal the weed out non-civil service management at the City.
How many employees are needed to run a City like San Diego? When we compare the total number of city employees to population size, its clear that the City of San Diego is already very lean compared to other cities across the nation. For Fiscal Year 2026 City of San Diego had 13,115 Employees serving a population of 1,400,000. That averages out to each employee serving 107 people.
Below is a list of the percent of City employees compared to the populations they serve.
City of San Diego 0.94%
San Antonio: 1%
Los Angeles: 1.29%
Denver:1.5%
NY City: 3.6%
San Francisco: 4%
The City of San Diego is experiencing significant personnel expenses due to overtime because of the lean workforce. Would you rather pay an employee the expected pay rate or 1.5 times the rate to cover extra shifts. The City needs to attract talent and fill vacancies in order to lower personnel costs.