Does City Senior Staff Consider Themselves Above the Scrutiny Applied to Common Folk?
Submitted on 2015/05/05 at 2:23 pm
From: Ted Noftall [mailto:Ted@tednoftall.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2015 1:24 PM
To: ‘Harden, David’
Manager Harden,
Your response belies your motivation that it is not so much that you cannot install greater accountability for exempt employees, AS you and your senior staff do not want to be subject to greater scrutiny.
This whole Administrative Leave aka Payroll Theft came to light because the little employees who carry the weight of City operations complained about the higher ups helping themselves to ill gotten gains at their expense of being required their own jobs, and the jobs of those who were AWOL
As Mark Schaefer has nicely taken you to task for trotting out that outdated standby excuse of some nebulous labor attorney telling someone something somewhere – let me address your other absurdies.
1) The payroll thefts may well have taken place over a dozen years or longer but the only portion that was able to be quantified at some $ 250,000 was for a three year span when absentee records were kept on Outlook Calendar. Prior to that they were kept in a little Red Book that was never produced as that investigation, as was the case with your recently released I Know Nothing Investigation, never placed anyone under oath with penalty for perjury, AND as is always the case in double standard softball investigations we learned nothing of value. So if employees were only required to repay 2/3 of a grossly undervalued number that was quite a deal indeed.
2) Your assertion that employees ” through no fault of his/her own, was a benefactor of this unauthorized grant of administrative leave.” is pure baloney.
If those employees were as innocent as you suggest why didn’t they openly show the time for which they were absent but for which they were being paid as Administrative Leave instead of falsifying their time cards to show they were on the job when in-fact they were not ?
3) Finally your admission that some three years after this taxpayer hosing biometric time clocks are not in use for exempt employees shows the utter distain ICMA mantra has for taxpayer dollars.
Your suggestion that ” senior management has to pay attention to what is going on around them. By senior management I mean the City Manager, Assistant City Manager and department heads ” is straight out of a Looking glass Bizzarro world where foxes guard henhouses. A more accurate observation is that it was the former Assistant City Manager and Department heads that were approving those falsified time cards AND our much heralded managers could not their gluteus maximus with both hands.
It is an abomination that hard working taxpayer monies are being trusted to an unverifiable honor system because you and your senior staff consider yourselves above the scrutiny applied to common folk.
Ted Noftall
for responsible government – 2016
The mayor and senior city management staff are systematically destroying the workforce infrastructure in Port Orange,
A recent post You Probably Mistreat Your Best Clients, by Tim Berry on his Planning Startup Stories got me thinking about a corollary … Do businesses treat their new hires better than their existing long-term employees?
Berry asks: Do your long-term loyal clients get the worst treatment? Do they pay the highest rates? Do you take them for granted? Do you give new customers better rates than existing customers?
Many pundits, organizations, governments, universities, authors, bloggers, and companies are proud to announce to one and all that “Their employees are their most valuable assets.” But is it really true? Do they really treat those employees as most valuable? Ask yourself the same questions, but substitute employees for clients and customers.
Do your long-term loyal employees get the worst treatment?
Do you take your long-term employees for granted? Do your long-term employees become invisible, competently doing those behind-the-scenes support roles so well that management just sort of assumes they will always be there? Do they perform their jobs so well that they are never considered for promotion or new opportunities? So necessary, yet so overlooked.
Do they get paid the highest salaries or the lowest? Have your people’s salaries kept pace with inflation and the cost of living? Do your most senior employees have less spendable income now than when they were hired? In some companies, especially those teetering on the edge of the cash flow abyss, it is entirely possible that they are now in violation of Wage and Hour laws because Federal and State Minimum wage amounts jumped ahead of what some people make, especially as many companies chose to forgo employee raises in 2009. That’s easy to test, for yourself: take the suspect salaries and compare them to the minimums.
Do you give new employees better salaries than existing employees? This one is prevalent in many businesses. It’s not that companies intentionally set out to short-change their long-term employees. It’s just that COL raises never keep pace with inflation, but new employees seek jobs with starting salaries commensurate with the current job market. The loyal, stable, current employee suddenly finds that the new hire, often in a lower tier in the organizational structure, is being paid more than they are, after putting in years of service building a successful company. And here’s a good test of that one: if you had to hire a new person to replace your existing one, would you have to pay more than their salary, or less?
Does it cost more to get a new employee or keep an existing one? Most companies know that the cost of losing an employee, and recruiting and training a new one, is very high. That’s in the business literature everywhere. Still, as a reminder, this is a paraphrase of a marketing axiom that it costs more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. This can apply to employees as well. Remember, in this context, that there is the productivity lost when the employee is no longer present. Next come the costs for advertising, screening, interviewing and filling the position. Then there are the losses during training periods, where you have two people (trainee and trainer) working at less than peak performance. In some cases the company loses skills and knowledge that can never be reacquired.
Those loyal long-term employees can save you from Santayana’s Law of Repetitive Consequences, i.e., “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” A “new” hot marketing program idea, for example, may turn out to be a complete waste of time and money … just like the last time it was tried … reinventing the flat tire, as it were … if there is no one left in the company who remembered when it flopped before.
Your long-term employees are the folks that helped you start up and grow your company to where it is today. They were key to the foundation of your venture, and now provide continuity between where you have been and where and what you plan to become.
You would think a retired city manager would of learned this during his long standing career but I forgot, this is government and he’s just waiting for the next big interim job to come along. He doesn’t care about Port Orange or its employees he’ll just leave it a mess like the last two did. GO ICMA!!