Louisville's next mayor needs to 'go by the book' and implement best practices | Opinion

Many of us know that Mayor Greg Fischer cannot control the favoritism, social privilege, opportunity hoarding, top-heavy waste and institutional racism in our Metro government because his personnel procedures are weak.

This was the first thought that came to mind when I read The Courier Journal’s recent story about an ex-city employee who won a judgment in court for $1 million against our Metro government for their misbehavior in responding to her complaint of racial discrimination and institutional racism.

I speak from personal experience. Within the span of my time as a front-line employee of the Louisville Metro government, my co-workers and I heard plenty of talk about the best practices in motivating employees to higher efficiency; though we saw precious little change in the organizational culture.

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One phrase that got repeated quite a bit was “performance improvement.” The point of it, we were told, was to improve the efficiency of our government as an organization.

In best practice terminology, however, systemic efforts to improve organizational efficiency are known as “performance measurement;” not “performance improvement.” As it turns out, there is a comprehensive body of professional literature in that field.

What our metro government actually seems to have is a scheme that allows the department heads to choose their department’s performance statistics for themselves and interpret their chosen statistics to their own advantage. As a result, there is no objectivity and no oversight as far as I could see.

That’s not how the standards of “performance measurement” would work if actual best practices were applied. Bear in mind that objectivity and oversight are critically important because these kinds of practices are designed to control favoritism, social privilege, opportunity hoarding, institutional racism, top-heavy waste and misuse of funds.

Looking around me in those years, I saw many more examples of freelance rulemaking in our metro government. In personnel management, for example, managers and administrators talked up the utility of job classifications, job descriptions and job audits for maintaining control of our metro government’s biggest cost – employees.

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The problem was those job descriptions were substantially written by the administrators and managers themselves with the acquiesce of the HR Department in most cases. Interpretations of those job descriptions were usually left to the authors. So, exemptions granted to one applicant or another were seldom, if ever, scrutinized. Job description changes weren’t scrutinized either. So, once more there was no objectivity and no oversight.

I also remember that the Ethics Tipline was once promoted as a critical safeguard against waste and abuse. Statistics on the kinds of complaints received were calculated and reported each month. To which, the internal auditor appended a monthly cover letter. It didn’t say much of anything, though. If the internal auditor performed any examination procedures on these complaints or the statistics, they weren’t described in the monthly cover letter. Here too, there was no objectively or oversight since the investigations of the internal complaints were routed to the HR Department; which was not organizationally independent of the metro government’s department heads.

Another supposed safeguard that drew considerable attention was the Mayor’s Annual Budget Document, including the extensive lists of employee positions in each department. These details looked impressive, but much was left out. What was missing were the amounts, comparisons with prior years, separation of the management positions from the non-management positions and the management to non-management ratios. The metro government’s pervasive problem with objectively and oversight appeared to be exposed here as well.

What’s our next metro mayor to do? For starters, she or he might want to consult the textbooks on the best practices in government management and insist the administrators and managers go by the book in the next administration. Look most determinedly into the best practices for objectivity and oversight.

Tom Louderback is a Louisville Metro government retiree and a volunteer for a number of communtiy service organizations.

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This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville's next mayor needs to 'go by the book' | Opinion