Originally Posted by MarchHare
Hi RobWard11,
I was a City of Calgary employee until a few months ago when I voluntarily resigned to pursue another career opportunity in the private sector. What you are saying above does not jive with my experience as a former City employee at all.
For example, this...
...is exactly the opposite of my personal experience. I know I'm only one person and this is anecdotal, but I was personally in budget planning meetings with Directors and one GM over the last 2-3 years where the message was, "We cannot absorb another budget reduction while still maintaining the same level of service. If council asks us to further decrease our budget, they must understand their decision will result in these specific proposed service reductions." Also, as a City staffer, I was always encouraged to submit ideas on how savings could be achieved to enable the public service to operate more efficiently. The SAVE Program, as Bunk mentioned above, is one recent high-profile example of this. The idea that any, let along many City employees would tell you that nobody wants to listen to their cost-saving ideas is laughable (unless, I suppose, they were simply bad ideas that were quite rightly dismissed by management, and employees mistook "management didn't implement my bad idea" with "management doesn't want to listen to me.")
Also, I never personally saw any DeptID Owner, Manager, Director, or GM who had a "spend it or lose it" budget mentality. Again, purely from my own anecdotal experience that obviously could have differed in other City Business Units/Departments outside my line of sight, literally nobody had that mentality.
Frankly, I seriously doubt you've actually talked with many City employees contrary to your claims, and if you did, they almost certainly would not have said those comments. I guess it makes for a nice political soundbite for a candidate running for office to say that you will "cut the fat" and "eliminate waste" so you can reduce taxes while still maintaining the same quality of public services, but that kind of facile, childish slogan doesn't accurately reflect the reality of municipal government.
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