I was planning to follow up on an announcement a few weeks ago from Boston City Hall, but I’ve outsourced much of my research to a guy in India – and he was on vacation.
The outsourcing/privatization itch is being scratched more feverishly almost everywhere these days – except, of course, by Massachusetts state government, which would rather have you smoke decriminalized amounts of marijuana than to threaten a unionized state employee job.
Even at Banker & Tradesman, the editor has been outsourced to a robot. You slip the story into a slot and the electronic voice says, “make it shorter, make it better – no raise for you again this year.” It’s uncanny; just like having the home-grown editor, except for the cigars and whiskey and stuff.
The Boston announcement was an obituary for the municipal printing department, which will apparently be disbanded and the printing work put out to bid.
As expected, there were the usual sad stories about guys who had worked in the city printing facility since the days of letterpress and Linotype machines. Perhaps some of them will catch on with the winning bidder, but there is a hidden fear that most of them will drift into newspaper column writing – a nightmarish path with no future.
As with most such announcements of late across the country, the privatization pushes by state and local governments are inevitably tied to tough economic times; to a current need to save some bucks and disgorge government employees and their big, fat, stupid pensions and union rules and overtime nightmares.
The government boys shouldn’t squander the opportunity to promote privatization as a philosophical blessing, quite aside from the financial benefit that often accompanies the process. The murky notion of “smaller government” (may it rest in peace) seemingly had little resonance in the modern age, but what privatization can offer is literally “smaller” government – while not necessarily shrinking government provision of goods and services.
Flushing Out Waste
Government as a purchasing agent, as opposed to the direct provider of public goods, is a relatively benign notion to most folks not on a government payroll. George Washington did not encourage his troops to cross the Delaware, so that full-time government employees would be personally empowered to plow the roads, mow the lawns, and of course, print City Hall letterheads.
It was Steve Goldsmith, long in residence at Harvard’s Kennedy School, who as the then-mayor of Indianapolis, popularized the notion that if government could find specific goods or services in the Yellow Pages, the obligation should be put out to bid. Goldsmith told me once that the one thing he was absolutely, positively, told never to privatize was water treatment plants. Of course, he promptly did just that, which saved the city millions of dollars, with no loss of quality. Goldsmith has now been snared by New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to run the top-secret Subversive Office of Quiet Privatization Planning, Which We Won’t Tell Anybody About.
Privatization isn’t perfect, of course. You must turn to Cohen the Columnist if what you’re looking for is perfection. A well-run, well-conceived government privatization effort requires something that government finds difficult to muster: Aggressive, competent contract-compliance monitoring and enforcement.
The Heartland Institute, a conservative, Chicago-based public policy think tank that views privatization as one step removed from a sacrament, once acknowledged in an aggressive broadside that “bribery, political influence, and ‘sweetheart deals’ can infect the process of contracting out public services.” But, the policy guys added, much the same happens in the public sector, without the potential cure of open bidding, competition and rebidding of contracts.
In jurisdictions where the public-sector employee unions reign supreme, one trick occasionally attempted in the privatization game is to allow the government employees to participate in the bidding process. There are examples of work-rule inanities magically disappearing, when union employees get a sniff of a real marketplace.
A handful of recently incorporated city-suburb enclaves outside of Atlanta have declared themselves “contract cities” – putting almost everything out to bid, reducing town hall to a manager, a secretary and a pot of petunias.
I have to stop now. The private contractor’s robot editor is beeping at me.
