BY MARK SCHUMANN

Anyone following yesterday’s City Council budget workshop could easily have picked up the impression the city is grossly over staffed.  Referencing benchmarking studies done last year, Councilwoman Pilar Turner said it is time to “right-size” city government.

According to Turner, among the cities recently surveyed, the average employee count is one per every 110 residents.  Vero Beach, she said, has one employee for every 44 residents.  Her comments could lead a trusting soul to believe the city has more than twice as many employees than it needs.

Turner’s numbers are misleading, and in citing them she is being disingenuous.

Not accounting for the city’s enterprise fund operations, which support themselves, Vero Beach has one employee for every 133 residents.  Contrary to Turner’s comments, Vero Beach’s general fund employee-to-resident ratio compares favorably to the cities benchmarked.

Given the differences between cities, benchmarking studies can be meaningless. For example, unlike Vero Beach, some cities do not have a recreation department, a police department, a municipal airport, beaches to guard, a water and sewer utility, a solid waste department, an electric utility, or 300 acres of parks.

Ironically, Vero Beach has been able to provide, not some, but all of these services on one of the lowest tax rates in the state.

One benchmark you may never hear from Turner, though, is a comparison of the Vero Beach’s  tax rate to other Florida cities. For decades, transfers from Vero Electric have enabled to city to offer the best in municipal services, while city taxpayers have enjoyed a millage rate half that of comparable cities.

Absent from Turner’s misdirected criticism of city staffing levels is any recognition of the fact that the city’s employee count is down some 20 percent from where it peaked eight years ago.  Not only has the city shed 20 percent of its work force, many of the remaining employees have seen their wages frozen and have had to accept furloughs.

To listen to Turner, one could easily get the idea a bloated, unmotivated city workforce is the cause of the city’s budget challenges. Perhaps it is helpful to keep in mind, through, that through the city manager, the Council is responsible for the hiring, training and motivating of the city’s employees.  So, who is to blame?

It is also helpful to remember that people will either rise or sink to expectations.  If morale is low among city employees, perhaps that is because they are under constant criticism from at least one member of the current Council.

Turner is correct in assessing that employee benefits, offered in more prosperous times, are overly generous, including double overtime, virtually unlimited accumulation of sick leave and vacation time, and health insurance for the city’s part-time Council members.  But the Councilwoman is wrong if she believes the special community she not long ago chose to call home became what it is by settling for some libertarian concept of “essential services.”

The simple truth is city leaders sold the public on turning over Vero Electric on the premise that electric rates savings would far exceed any needed tax increases.  Now, with the referendum approved, and the city’s employee count already down 20 percent, city leaders are looking at making further cuts that will surely diminish services.

Rather than having an honest conversation about how transfers from the electric system have kept the city’s tax rate artificially low, the Council now seems intent on a Tea-Party-style agenda of reducing government services to the bear essentials, subjective as that concept may be.

The Council decided yesterday to have the enterprise operations transfer an additional $1.1 million to the general fund in compensation for the money the city plans to infuse in the pension plan.  That move will reduce the city’s projected budget gap to $1.1 million.

Assuming City Manager Jim O’Connor and his staff can close half of the budget gap through reorganizing, cross training, an selective outsourcing, the city’s tax payers would only need to accept a tax increase of approximately 14 percent, or $550,000. 

To put that $550,000 in perspective, the 12,000 electric customers within the city are projected to save $10 million a year, if and when Vero Electric is sold to Florida Power & Light.

The budget numbers will all change three years after the sale of the electric system, though, when FPL will no longer be paying $1.5 million in rent on the power plant site.  Looking to that day, the Council has directed City Manager Jim O’Connor to find a way to cut, not $1.1 million, but $2.2 million from the city’s general fund budget.  To achieve such steep cuts, an additional 30 or more employees will need to be laid off.

O’Connor said the cuts, amounting to 11 percent of the city’s budget, cannot be made without impacting city services.  Rather than shuttering the Riverhouse, laying off police officers, cutting back on lifeguard protection, picking up garbage less often, or, heaven forbid, doing away with the health insurance benefit for Council members, why not level with tax payers about the need to raise another $1.1 million to support city services, all in exchange for $10 million in savings on their electric bills?  How is that not a win-win?

Listening to Turner’s criticisms of city employees, I was reminded of a story in GQ Magazine about the time when the late Al Neuharth, former president of Gannett Newspapers, was belittling a limousine drive who was taking Neuharth from his home in Cocoa Beach to his corporate jet at the Melbourne airport.

When the limousine driver had finally had enough of Neuharth’s censure, he stopped the car on the Pineda Causway, opened the trunk, set Neuharth’s luggage on the side of the road, and then told the president of the nation’s largest media company to get out of the car.