MB City Budget Must Require Performance Appraisals

It's time again to create the annual city budget in Manhattan Beach, and this year salary and benefits of city staff have risen to a whopping 73 percent of our general fund ($44.3 million of $60.6 million). Even more alarming is that a large percentage of our city's 274 full-time employees don't even receive a routine annual performance appraisal.  

This is just bad management, and a rudimentary failure of our City Council to perform its fiduciary duty as good stewards of our tax dollars.  

It's been repeatedly recommended, at each of Council's budget study sessions and more, that Council introduce the reasonable and customary requirement that every city employee receive a performance appraisal every year. Shockingly, a Council majority has turned a deaf ear, despite their continual claims of fiscal responsibility.  

Only those who are under-performers themselves resist the effective use of such basic management tools.

There are many, many more areas of our city's budget that beg for improvements in basic oversight and management. Our new city manager arrives in July and must be given the opportunity to immediately introduce a higher level of accountability that ought to directly address, in this year's budget, many such needs. 

Nevertheless, there is no excuse for our City Council to allow three quarters ($44.3 million) of our general fund to continue to go so woefully unmanaged.

After all, few can disagree with the very words of our mayor that so dominated our mailboxes during her recent campaign for higher office: "I am tired of wasteful government spending."

Gerry O'Connor

Manhattan Beach