I’ve gotten some phone calls from time to time from citizens who are fed up with government; all government national, state and local.  I have had people actually tell me to fire everyone that works at the City of Fernley and start over. 

First, it is not a City Councilman’s job to fire anybody.  However, it is true that the City Council can vote to terminate the City Manager, Treasurer, Clerk, City Attorney and the Judge, since we are actually the ones that vote to hire them; and t takes at least 3 council members to take any action.  Even a majority of the City Council can’t vote to terminate any other employee with the city, since that would be in direct violation of Ordinance 1.  By law, we are not allowed to get involved with day to day personnel issues of any kind.  It’s the council’s job to approve budgets, set policies, approve development and represent the city in many ways.  Micro-management of departments and employees is not our job.  That is the job of the various department heads and ultimately the City Manager.

In my opinion, I get very concerned when I hear some of my counterparts on the City Council say, on the record, that they want to micro-manage and deal directly with employees.  Can you imagine 5 members of the City Council independently trying to manage the day to day affairs of the city?  What an unorganized fiasco that would become, I wouldn’t want any part of that and I don’t think the large majority of our citizens would either.

As for the citizens who have called me and told me to see that everyone was fired.  All I can say is that we do have trained people there to do the jobs that need to be done.  It’s not like they sit around all day with nothing to do and just collect a paycheck at the taxpayer’s expense.  We have some very good people who work for the city and they care about this community.  In fact, with budget and staff cuts we now have less people doing more work than ever before.

I’m all for ways to streamline the city government as much as possible.  I’m willing to listen to ideas about re-organization.  But while there might be some areas in which privatization might work; in the large majority of areas, they would not.  If we have enough steady work in a position to occupy a full-time employee, then it is much less expensive than a contract employee to the taxpayer.  Case in point; we are seeing sizable savings at the new Water Treatment Plant by converting contracted personnel with in-house full-time employees.