L.A. City Bureaucracy

Hooray for “A City Worker Protection That May Have Outlived Its Usefulness” (Opinion, Nov. 27)! In all the brouhaha over streamlining Los Angeles city government and reduction of the city’s work force, only Xandra Kayden has pointed the finger in the direction of a major problem that costs the city dearly, the civil service system.

The problems Kayden related regarding lack of accountability, inability to reward and inability to terminate extend throughout the city to all employees. Supervisors and managers at all levels have no supervisory control. They are unable to directly hire the employees that they will supervise and have very little opportunity to fire a problem employee, once hired or promoted.

The rigid job classification system combined with constrained advancement practices causes the promotion of supervisors and managers selected from a very small pool of existing employees. The result is a large number of supervisors and managers are ill-equipped to carry out the responsibilities of their new position. The losses due to poorly run sections, departments and divisions can hardly be accounted for, not to mention the loss of morale on the employees’ part.

Mayor Riordan and the City Council must work together to wholesale revamp the bureaucracy of the civil service system. Accountability will not work only at the top, but must be implemented throughout the work force. If the bureaucracy can be revamped, Mayor Riordan and the City Council will be pleased to find a cost-effective and hard-working group of employees that is presently hidden underneath a mountain of mind-numbing, outdated and senseless bureaucratic muddle.

ANN DALKEY, Water Biologist

Environmental Monitoring Division

Bureau of Sanitation, Los Angeles