City Councilman and cracking good analyst Carl DeMaio breaks down how San Diego’s budget turned upside down. As he puts it, spending more and getting less.
Once you get down to a reliable calculation of full costs, you should ask the most important question in government reform: What drives the per-unit costs?
Answering this question usually leads to three primary cost drivers: inefficient processes, old ways of doing business and old technologies. In some cases, costs result from bloated bureaucracies, i.e. too many people doing the same thing. And then in other cases, costs can be attributed to high labor costs on a per-employee basis.
The city of San Diego suffers from three of these cost-drivers. . .