Curb cuts may all look the same, but in Los Angeles each one is individually designed by city engineers, according to Mayor Richard Riordan.
Riordan thinks that’s an outrageous waste of money, and in his new budget wants the responsibility for curb cuts to be transferred from the Bureau of Engineering to the Bureau of Street Services.
“The Bureau of Engineering is way overstaffed,” the mayor told the Business Journal. “What is really frustrating is that I know we should be cutting staff. The way to do that is to give golden handshakes: a one-time payout and then savings forever. This is doable. But every time you deal with the City Council and even mention the cutting of jobs, even if they are not literally layoffs, it’s just excruciating.”
And according to Riordan budget director Jennifer Roth, there’s no better sign of the bureau’s featherbedding than curb cuts those ramps that help people in wheelchairs get on and off sidewalks.
“Every single time they do a curb ramp, even though it’s an identical construction, they redesign the entire curb ramp,” Roth said. “It’s pretty amazing. What it does, effectively, is reduce the number of curb ramps they can produce every year because they spend and invest so much money designing it every time.”
Bureau of Engineering spokesman Bob Hayes did not dispute assertions by Riordan and Roth.
“When the mayor makes comments like he has, I don’t think you will find anyone willing to comment from within the city,” Hayes said. “They don’t want to get into a criticizing match with the mayor, who is, in fact, their boss. It therefore would not be wise to respond.”
Bob Duncan, executive director of the Engineers and Architects Association, which represents most of the engineers in the city bureaus, said he did not know whether each curb cut was individually designed.
On its face, however, Duncan said the claim “sounds ridiculous. I suspect there’s more to it than that.”
According to the mayor’s budget office, the Bureau of Engineering does design work on hundreds of curb cuts each year. Officials were not able to say how much time is spent on each cut, but the average salary for engineers at the 1,025-worker department is $56,000.
While Duncan could not address the mayor’s complaints, he said that Riordan’s assertion that the bureau is inefficient and overstaffed was “dead wrong.”
“Our engineers in all city departments have saved the citizens of Los Angeles $200 million since Mayor Riordan took office, in areas like workers’ compensation costs and better safety measures,” he said.
Roth said the mayor’s proposed 1998-99 budget transfers responsibility for engineering work on curb cuts to the Bureau of Street Services as part of a $1.8 million reduction in the Bureau of Engineering’s $62 million budget. Also being transferred is engineering work for bus stop landings, landscapes, bikeways and street widening. In all, 23 positions are being transferred.
“The Bureau of Street Services will produce those curb cuts in a much more efficient way. It’s a small way in which we were trying to streamline and improve functions in the city,” Roth said.
Duncan said the transfer of the curb-cut work was part of a move to increase efficiency, and nothing more.
“It has absolutely nothing to do with ineptitude or incompetence at the Bureau of Engineering,” Duncan said. “Our representatives on the Labor-Management Committee agreed to this. We’re moving a little group of employees from the Bureau of Engineering to the Bureau of Street Maintenance because it makes sense for them to be there. It’s consolidating functions, making the city more efficient. It is not because there is any featherbedding going on,” he said.
Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, a staunch advocate of city employee groups, said that if the mayor was so concerned about overstaffing, he should have taken action sooner.
“Look, he’s got the budget power to make cuts any time he wants to,” Goldberg said. “If he feels the Bureau of Engineering is overstaffed, then he could have started an eight-year program of cuts at 5 percent a year right when he took office. We’d probably be down 30 percent in staff right now if he’d done that.”
In fact, the staffing level at the Bureau of Engineering has fallen steadily, according to Riordan’s budget summary. In 1995, the bureau had approximately 1,500 positions; in the current 1997-98 fiscal year, it has about 1,025 positions. The 1998-99 budget has funding for 950 spots.
Riordan said that the Bureau of Engineering is one of a number of city agencies in which people come up with “projects that make no sense, just to justify their existence. If we had charter reform, we could do a quick, excellent job in dramatically cutting costs.”
But Goldberg said the mayor does not need charter reform to make budget cuts. The council, she said, has restored less than $10 million in cuts made by Riordan in his budget in any given year, out of a total budget of $4 billion.
“If he can show the need for cuts, we almost always go along,” Goldberg said. “It’s easier to do this in Los Angeles than almost any other major city. And that’s because the charter gives the mayor the authority to propose the budget; in other cities like New York or Chicago, the budgets come from the city council.”
