State Panel Calls for Reforms in Civil Service

California should link pay raises to performance and eliminate tenure for its 185,000 Civil Service workers, a government watchdog panel is recommending.

The Little Hoover Commission also recommended turning more public work over to private industry, going outside Civil Service to hire government supervisors and making it easier for the state to promote and fire state employees.

“California’s Civil Service system . . . has mutated into a bureaucracy within a bureaucracy--one that is rigid, duplicative and unresponsive,” the commission said in a report issued Thursday and entitled “Too Many Agencies, Too Many Rules.”

But a state employees union said the report would return state services to the “spoils system” of a century ago when political supporters were rewarded with government jobs.

California State Employees Assn. spokesman Drew Mendelson said the report was politically motivated--a charge the commission denied. The bipartisan commission’s 13 members are appointed by Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature.

California’s Civil Service system was created in 1913 to promote fairness in state hiring based on written examinations. But the Little Hoover Commission said many Civil Service protections have been made obsolete by collective bargaining.

The commission said the State Personnel Board, which oversees the Civil Service system and hears appeals from demoted and fired workers, should be abolished.

Other recommendations include eliminating tenure and automatic pay raises, recruiting supervisors from outside state service, and amending the state Constitution to allow more public work to be done by private firms.

The union said such proposals would politicize state management at all levels, deny workers due process and cost the state more money in the long run because more employees would sue.