While all of the attention has gone to what control the governor would have over the State Civil Service Commission, ignored has been perhaps a more important change over establishing job classifications that came to light last week, reminding of the necessity of that alteration.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry wanted to have the SCSC at its last meeting to change 21 positions, totaling 900 current jobs, in state government from the classified to unclassified service as hired after Jul. 1. Classified positions provide their holders more job security and a defined schedule of compensation, while unclassified employees can be more easily hired and fired and be paid in a greater compensation range.
Landry Administration officials testified that these positions, attorneys and engineers, as classified disallowed offerings of competitive salaries that created shortages and inability into inducing continuity into the workforce. Additionally, compared to public sector employment nationally, Louisiana state government has among the highest per capita number of attorneys and engineers employed, so the plan would be to have the flexibility to pay more and maneuver the number of positions according to market conditions, which almost certainly would mean fewer total jobs than at present.
Yet the Commission, which has a history of trying to preserve state employment jobs and circumscribing merit-based solutions to boost employee productivity, rejected the move, with commissioners in the majority claiming doing this would create more instability in times of budgetary stress. With one commissioner absent, only two of six voted to approve, perhaps not coincidentally the two appointees of Landry wanting to approve and three appointees of Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards plus the elected state classified employee representative disapproving.
While the concept of civil service is valuable, in that it tries to minimize politics in personnel decisions that threatens to diminish performance, the way it’s structured in Louisiana gives too much power to the unelected Commission. Aside from the employee representative, each of the six private college leaders gives the governor a list of three individuals to choose from for the rolling six-year fixed terms representing all congressional districts. While this insulates selection from political pressures by elected officials, it makes it susceptible to pressure from employee special interests and no other state uses such a walled-off procedure.
That was a problem GOP state Sen. Jay Morris tried to solve with a bill last year to amend Constitution for the selection process. It would have allowed the governor three unmediated selections with the other three from the aggregated list of three nominations by six leaders. This would have inculcated more responsiveness from appointees to overcome the over-insulation of commissioners that leads them to listen more to the special interest of 34,000 or so state employees than to 4.6 million state residents.
Predictably, the mainstream media spun a narrative that this was a power grab by Landry and confined its reporting almost exclusively to the appointment issue. But the amendment also would have removed exclusive power to make such a change as had been petitioned last week from the Commission and given the Legislature the ability to make these changes by statute.
This also would have helped to rebalance the scales and even possibly obviate the need to change the appointment process, maybe in combination with term limits. As increasingly government becomes less immune to market forces, the Legislature is a much nimbler institution to address job classification issues to maintain efficiency and effectiveness in running a properly-sized government.
Last year, the Senate gave the required two-thirds majority to the bill, but the measure came up a couple of votes short in the House likely due to absences in the crush of business at session’s end, so it didn’t make it to the people for their approval. Morris or somebody else needs to try again this year, as this reform will aid Landry’s salutary goal of paring unnecessary spending in state government and make it work better.
No comments:
Post a Comment