Images and Reality in Local Government Personnel Practices: Investigating the "Quiet Crisis" among Illinois City Officials

Abstract

In recent years, the public administration community and political leadership have expressed increasing concern that the conditions and status of public service are declining. It has been called a quiet crisis in American government (Levine and Kleeman, 1992). Beside the widely publicized Volcker Commission that focused on the federal civil service, especially at the senior executive level, several other commissions or task forces have also been created to examine the state of the public service more generally. A task force on Revitalizing the Public Service, created by the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA), issued its report in 1991, and the Commission on the State and Local Public Service is scheduled to issue its report in 1993. At the individual state level, mini-Volcker commissions have been set up in Illinois and Ohio. The Illinois Commission on the Future of the Public Service has already completed its work and issued three reports outlining specific reform proposals for the government of the state of Illinois, Cook County, and the City of Chicago (Illinois Commission on the Future of Public Service, 1992). Several other states have similar activities in studying Workforce 2000 issues as they affect their public service (Sherwood, 1992). These commissions and task forces raised several important issues such as politicization and patronage. The Volcker Commission expressed considerable concern about the increasing politicization of the higher civil service jobs in the federal government. Similar questions have been raised by both the Illinois commission and by the commission on American State and Local Public Service (Thompson, 1992).[1] Another major issue has been compensation. The salary and benefits of public employees, especially professional and administrative level employees, have not kept up with inflation and the private sector (Goodsell, 1985; National Commission on the Public Service, 1989). It is argued that this has already made it difficult for the public sector to attract the best and the brightest (Marzotto, 1991). Increasing managerial discretion and decentralization are seen as important issues in the debate about improving government performance, productivity, and accountability, and in combating bureaucratic rigidity. The traditional civil service system, characterized by detailed job descriptions and salary schedules, elaborate grievance and disciplinary procedures, and highly formalized, time-consuming recruitment processes, appears to leave public managers with very little discretion in managing their human resources (Ingraham and Rosenbloom, 1992). Public sector collective bargaining simply adds to the concern about the inability of public managers to manage. Some see the state of the merit system, at least in the federal government, as confused even beyond repair (Ingraham and Rosenbloom, 1992, p. 291). The Findings Perhaps one of the most enduring of concerns in the debate on the American public service has been about the role of political partisanship and patronage in our public service. This concern about patronage and partisanship has greatly diminished over the last half a century as far as the federal government is concerned. However, in recent years, some alarm has been raised about politicization of the senior levels of the federal civil service under the Reagan administration (National Commission on the Public Service, 1989). Concern about the influence of patronage and political partisanship on public service at the state and local level, especially the local level, has remained high despite great strides made in the professionalization of public service, including the widespread adoption of council-manager form of government. It is widely assumed that patronage is endemic in smaller cities, especially nonmanager cities (Sharp, 1990). However, that assumption does not seem to hold in Illinois according to our respondents. …