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posted April 8, 2006
Multiplying managers:
One big cost is the ever-increasing bulk of management. Besides the general manager (called a "commissioner" in many cities), Parks and Recreation now has six directors and 36 managers, who in turn have many supervisors working under them. Five of the managers are "managers of management services." There’s a director of "divisional coordination and compliance" and under her there is a "manager of agenda coordination and service integration." The jobs of some of these managers are so broad it’s hard to know how they could ever become practical. For instance, the “manager of community development” says her job is "rolling out a community engagement plan for the entire division...to create Parks, Forestry and Recreation Teams in geographical regions... These teams will ensure all staff ... are engaging and rolling out community development initiatives i.e. volunteer management plan, advisory councils, crisis management, special events..."
The people who are assigned to manage public space in this way cost quite a lot. The salaries of two managers are the same as the total City wages of all the recreation staff who run Dufferin Grove Park year-round.
New managers are still being added, not always billed as such. For instance, Parks and Recreation just hired 19 new staff whose job is explicitly not direct service but rather to track down "youth with a disability, newcomer youth, youth from at-risk neighborhoods, aboriginal youth, and youth from racially diverse, culturally diverse, sexually diverse, and gender diverse communities," to go to meetings about such youth and to monitor/educate Parks and Recreation staff in how they deal with them, to do liaison with other agencies about them, and to write a large number of administrative reports. The jobs are permanent, the wages are good, and insiders at City Hall warned right away that this group was simply a new layer of management. Direct recreation programs for youth remain understaffed.