There are constant comments in Thunder Bay that there are
too many municipal workers and that the numbers have grown faster than the city
itself. In a 1979 article in the Urban
Affairs Quarterly titled “Economy of Scale or Bureaucratic Entropy?
Implications for Metropolitan Governmental Reorganization”, Hutcheson and
Prather examine the relationship between the number of city employees and city
population. This study was done
given the fashion of the time to implement metropolitan and regional city
governments that consolidated jurisdictions that often was justified by the
argument that more efficiency and economy in service delivery would
result. According to the authors:
“If efficiency can be
defined as serving more residents with fewer employees, economies of scale
might be demonstrated by a relative decrease in the size of bureaucracies as
city size increases.” (Hutcheson & Prather, 167).
However, the authors find that not to be the case. Increases in the number of employees
appear to have outstripped the growth in population in the wake of
amalgamations and metropolitan reforms.
The new institutions appear to have generated a dynamic in which has
resulted in less rather than more efficiency. They call this bureaucratic entropy. Essentially, the new institutions
create a kind of disorder, which decreases the efficiency with which manpower
is converted into service outputs.
Or as they write:
“Or more simply put,
it could be easier to ‘goldbrick’ in a larger bureaucracy. Thus increasing city size may mean
proportionately larger bureacracies, and perhaps diseconomies of scale.”
(Hutcheson & Prather, 168).
Well, it would appear that bureaucratic entropy is alive and
well in Thunder Bay at the municipal level. The accompanying figure shows full-time equivalent
employment numbers for the City of Thunder Bay for the period 2001 to
2011. In 2001, FTE employment was
1,632.0 whereas by 2011 it had risen by 25 percent to reach 2032.7 (my estimate based on the 2012 operating budget breakdown). Over the same period, the CMA population
of Thunder Bay went from 121,986 to 121,597 – essentially, a stable population.
So is this bureaucratic entropy? Did the creation of monopoly municipal government at the
Lakehead after amalgamation in the place of the former competitive municipal structure
of twin cities put in place a bureaucratic structure that does not keep costs
in check? That may be part of the
explanation. Another explanation
lies in the mix of city services, the demand for new services as well as
changes in their quality. Municipal governments are expected to do more than they did
in 1970 particularly in the areas of health and environment. Tied to all of
this is the fact that in Ontario, municipalities are creatures of the provinces
and there is often the downloading of functions that necessitate new
employment.
A better question is the following. Has municipal employment in Thunder Bay
been growing faster than Canada as a whole? Compare the following – from 2001 to 2011, municipal
employment in Thunder Bay grows by 25 percent while population remains stable. For Canada as a whole during this
period, the number of municipal employees grew by 24 percent but population
grew by 11 percent. While
municipal employment in Canada has been growing faster than population –
perhaps an indicator of some bureaucratic entropy – the growth is more
pronounced in Thunder Bay.
