EACH YEAR available funds for basic governmental service decrease. In Marin, police, fire, schools, sewers, public transit and social services all have to make do with less. Part of the cause is too much tax revenue ends up paying for needless bureaucracies and their gold-plated trappings.

The best government professionals understand the new and permanent reality that their agencies need to become lean and efficient. Others still don’t get it.

Exemplifying the clueless are regional agencies led by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission who late last year voted to spend $167 million in bay bridges toll money to buy and remodel a 1940s-era eight-story office building in San Francisco’s booming South of Market district.

Moving in with MTC are the Bay Area Air Quality Control District and the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. The rationale is that all of these agencies need more space for their ever-increasing staffs. The financial justification is that during the next 20 years, earnings from renting excess space in the building at 390 Main Street will reap substantial profits that will more than pay the structure’s initial cost.

Trust that and you rely on the Tooth Fairy to fund your dental work.

The MTC will move from Oakland’s Joe Bort Metrocenter, which it shares with the Association of Bay Area Governments. Presumably, ABAG, with its own growing staff, is delighted to

take over the building.

This is a Marin issue just as much as it relates to any of the Bay Area’s nine counties.

These regional bureaucracies stay under the radar because they aren’t responsible to any one county. Allegedly, they are responsible to the whole region. Effectively, they are responsible to no one.

Marin’s veteran MTC representative is Supervisor Steve Kinsey. He’s a key player at every step backing MTC’s publicity-shy honcho Steve Heminger.

Moving MTC from Oakland was a fight. Oakland is a troubled city that relies on high-paying government jobs to create its middle class. Oakland’s struggling downtown is chock-a-block with vacant 1940s-era office buildings. Many can be rented for a song, with owners delighted to make tenant improvements in return for long-term leases.

Purchasing 70-year-old 390 Main St. was decided on a 8-6 vote, with Kinsey standing with the majority.

When pondering why three regional agencies would need to purchase a 497,204-square-foot building to house their expanding staff, the question necessarily arises as to what it costs to pay these folks.

Check its employment numbers: MTC has 220 employees costing $30.5 million including “salaries and benefits” plus “other expenses.” That doesn’t include $39.8 million in “professional fees”

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District of “Spare the Air on Christmas” fame has an astounding 321 employees. Its annual staff expenditures total $46.7 million, averaging $145,482 per employee, including pensions and health care. That’s plus $11.2 million for consultants. Monitoring chimneys is expensive.

The new edifice will house 580 full-time employees, whose annual earnings total $81.1 million.

What does the public get in return? Paper-pushers expert at mission creep.

That’s the definition of a project going well beyond its original assignment.

Invented with much promise in the 1970s, regional transportation, housing and air quality agencies thrive all over the Golden State. They are staff-heavy regional agencies, few of whom perform any on-the-ground public services. They are masters of “coordination.”

Now it’s clearer why municipalities have fewer firefighters, police, librarians, street repair crews, teachers, bus drivers and nurses.

A route to fostering people-serving public services is by dismantling this statewide web of empire-building bureaucracies that employ thousands and cost hundreds of millions.

Columnist Dick Spotswood of Mill Valley shares his views on local politics every Sunday in the IJ. His email address is spotswood@comcast.net. Read his musings at http://blogs.marinij.com/spotswood/

Article source: http://www.marinij.com/opinion/ci_19691993