Council Questions Booker Staffing Levels

During budget hearings Wednesday members of the Newark Municipal Council accused Mayor Cory Booker of failing to cut spending in his office as steeply as he claimed, even while he has publicly chided the governing body for failing to tighten its own belt.

During the hearing to discuss the $17 million administrative budget, Councilman-at-Large Carlos Gonzalez questioned Business Administrator Julien X. Neals regarding the job classification for Michele Ralph-Rawls, who works in the mayor’s office as the director of staff development, according to the city’s Web site.

Her official listed title in the budget presented to the council, however, is director of personnel, a job title that does not fall within the mayor’s office.

During his state of the city address earlier this year, Booker said he slashed expenses in his office and criticized members of the council for resisting efforts to do the same with their staffs. In February The Star Ledger reported that salaries and wages for Newark’s governing body are six times higher than for the council in similarly sized Jersey City.

“You want to showcase that the mayor has cut his expenses, but all he’s done is switched them to another department,” said North Ward Councilman Anibal Ramos, who, along with other council members, also commended Ralph-Rawls for the work she’s done for the city.

Neals, however, said that assigning employees to jobs that don’t exactly match their titles is not an attempt to make a particular department’s labor cost numbers “artificially low.” Instead, because of cutbacks, the city needs to be flexible when assigning workers.

“We have circumstances where employees are listed as being with a particular department but work in other departments, and there have been circumstances where there has been a scarcity of resources on some occasions and staffing reductions on other occasions where some employees have been assigned to other departments,” Neals said. “Where someone in law is working in administration, typically there’s going to be a balance from a budget perspective when that happens.”
 
Council members also questioned whether other agencies employ people who are actually working elsewhere within city government, specifically citing Newark’s nonprofit economic development agency, the Brick City Development Corp.

“The mayor is going all over the place, he jumps on our budget, but how many people get paid out of the Brick City budget?” said Central Ward Councilman Darrin Sharif. “It allows the mayor to have it both ways.”

Neals, however, brushed aside the suggestion that Brick City is a job “mill” or that those employed at the nonprofit agency are actually stealth city workers. Neals did say employees of Brick City have to work closely with city agencies, like the office of economic development, in order to fulfill the nonprofit’s mission of attracting more commerce to the city. 

West Ward Councilman Ron Rice called for a “desk audit” of city hall personnel, in which each employee’s job title and supervisor are catalogued and a precise organizational chart drawn up. Council members also called for a similar audit of Brick City.

The discussion over staffing dovetailed with a separate exploration of the city’s 4311 system, a help line residents can call to report quality of life problems from potholes to fallen tree limbs. Council members Wednesday said that because the system works intermittently at best, however, residents eventually call council staff for help -- the very staff Booker is urging the council to reduce. 

“All day long my staff addresses constituent complaints that don’t get addressed on the fifth floor,” Rice said. “Come stand here on the third floor [where council staff work]. The hive center is right here.”

Rice also said that the requests his staff receives do not always lie within the traditional purview of municipal government, adding another challenge.

“People come in not just looking for street paving but for housing, they come in looking for a job,” Rice said. “Providing social services like this isn’t really our job, but we try to help people where they are.”