Featherbedding (v): The practice of hiring more workers than are needed to perform a given job, or to adopt work procedures which appear pointless, complex and time-consuming merely to employ additional workers.
Source: Wikipedia
This is my usual TLDR posting style. Just skip to the conclusion if you just want the bottom line of what I think I heard at the 4/18/2022 Town Council session on leaf collection and disposal. With the understanding that it might be just so much wishful thinking.
Historical perspective on the 4/18/2022 Vienna Town Council session.
In 1959, the Town of Vienna formed a commission to address the future governance of the Town.
That commission considered whether or not Vienna should try to become a city. That meant “an independent city”, a legal concept unique to the Commonwealth of Virginia. Becoming an independent city would, in effect, displace governance by the surrounding Fairfax County entirely. The City of Vienna would receive all relevant local tax revenue and provide all relevant local government services.
That commission also considered the exact opposite, which was to give up the Town charter, cease being a Town under Virginia law, and simply revert to being a part of Fairfax County.
There were a lot of tax and service-related arguments in favor of that, and arguments against that.
In the end, it was a remarkably close decision. After significant deliberations, the committee voted 5-4 in favor of keeping the Town charter. And not surrendering it, and revert to being just another part of Fairfax County.
Some 70-odd years later, Vienna is still here. And many of the pros and cons discussed at that time remain relevant.
Of all the reasons that committee listed in favor of giving up the Town charter, the one that I can still recall most clearly is this one:
Source: Town of Vienna Newsletter, March 1961.
After attending the Town Council’s 4/18/2021 session on leaf collection and mulch, I was much reminded of item 4 above. Or, as one fellow attendee put it afterwards, “I pay additional taxes for that?”, referring to the apparent quality of the Town’s deliberative process in this matter.
Without detail, let me just say that a lot of the discussion and statements were just jaw-dropping. And not in a good way. I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just summarizing what that session looked like, to reasonably-well-informed outside observers.
There must have been a two dozen times where a single sentence of clarification could have kept the discussion on track. Some actual back-and-forth on the facts at issue. Maybe some common understanding of what we actually do now (although that was presented in a prior public hearing, it seems at least some Town Council members had forgotten the details.)
But that’s not how the TOV process works.
The process is all about every TC member getting a chance to say whatever he or she wants, for however long it takes. It doesn’t really much matter if what is said is (e.g.) wrong on the facts. Or whether contradictory statements from various parties are never resolved. Or whether it focuses on the big picture or the trivia.
In the end, given that, the only true idiot in the room was me. I’m sitting there hoping for some sort of top-down rationality to come out of this. But the reality of it is that, if something rational comes out of this, it’s certainly not baked into the process.
The process is just not designed to focus on the big issues and highlight the logical consequences of what’s been said. Or the lack thereof. It’s designed to given seven people the opportunity to speak. And not much more.
My 10,000 foot overview, or why featherbedding is a key issue.
Let me try to clarify one big issue, highlighting it by using the pejorative term “featherbedding”. The definition is at the top of the post.
A lot of what should have been the real, meaningful debate over the options turns on how you value the Department of Public Works (DPW) staff time that would be freed up, if Vienna were to change how it disposes of its leaves. Do you think they’d produce valuable additional output, or just slack off or “featherbed”. That, in turn, determines how you value the Town’s “free” mulch. And what you think the total cost and benefits of the various proposals are.
The argument, in outline
For the issue at hand, the Town has an opportunity to free up an eight-acre parcel of land, worth maybe $16M. And to end a blight on the surrounding neighborhood. A blight that has been there ever since the Town moved the leaf-collection-and-grinding to that neighborhood, after residents living around the Town’s former leaf-grinding site complained about it.
First, changing the leaf disposal methods might or might not result in a small deadweight loss to Town government. That’s due to contracting out some of the trucking, to an estimated cost of $61K. But the total impact of that change depends not just on the trucking contract, but on whether you think the Town’s Department of Public works does a lot of featherbedding or not. If (and only if) freeing up an additional full-time equivalent (FTE) or two of labor results in DPW staff slacking off, and doesn’t result in any additional valuable output, then spending money to free up that labor is a deadweight loss for the town. If, by contrast, DWP will put that newly freed-up time to good use, then the cost of the trucking is more than offset by the value of the additional valuable work DPW will get done.
Second, there still seem to be Town Council members who truly and sincerely believe that the Town’s mulch should be free. But the logic of that position also depends on whether you think DPW will just featherbed away any additional staff time available to it. If not, at the minumum, the production of the mulch costs you the value of what else DWP staff could be producing with their time, if they weren’t burdened with mulch production and distribution duties.
And as importantly, as I try to argue below, the logical link between your assessment of the cost/benefit tradeoffs, and DWP featherbedding, works in both directions. In effect, we have a lot of Town Council members who, as a matter of logic, hold positions that assume that DPW will simply waste any additional staff time given to it. They don’t say that explicitly, but it’s said implicitly by placing zero value on any additional output DPW would produce from additional free staff time. In effect, they assume that DPW’s response to greater labor availability will be featherbedding, not valued additional services provided to the Town.
To put it as crudely as possible, given the detailed accounting provided by Town staff, the only way to justify free mulch is to believe that DPW staff routinely slack off as much as possible. With that accounting now in hand, “free mulch” and “featherbedding DPW staff” are two sides of the same coin. Because now we have a reasonably accurate estimate of how much extra hours of staff time it takes to produce and distribute that much (Option 1), instead of just hauling the leaves off to be mulched in Loudoun County. And those hours could be put to productive use elsewhere, then the value of that additional output is what you give up by continuing to run your mulching operation.
As I discuss below, DPW certainly does NOT appear to be a featherbedding type of operation. At least not to me. That’s why I think the logic of this needs to be explicit. Town Council should either come right out and say it — that DPW will just waste any extra resources allocated to it — or not. And if not, if we assume there’s no-to-minimal featherbedding at DPW, then Town Council’s estimates of the options being considered, and the concept of “free” mulch, both need to be modified accordingly.
In a nutshell, there ain’t no such thing as free mulch. Not unless you think DPW would featherbed away any free hours created by getting rid of the mulching operation.
In the end, as I discuss below, I’m afraid that the ultimate problem is that people won’t look beyond the Town budget. If it’s not in the budget, they don’t want to hear about it.
But“Value of DPW output” is not a line-item anywhere in the budget. And because of that, a lot of decision-makers seem to be ignoring it. But ignoring changes in the value of DPW’s output is the same as counting it as zero. It’s the same as assuming DPW will just consume any newly-freed hours by featherbedding, instead of by providing valuable services to the Town of Vienna.
Here’s the argument in more detail.
If you think DPW routinely featherbeds its tasks and so is just going to waste the staff time liberated by a streamlined leaf processing approach, then for the most streamlined approach (Option 3, long haul), the town is out the $61K cost of a leaf-trucking contract, with nothing to offset that cost. All they’ve done by contracting out the hauling is to provide provide DPW staff with more paid leisure time.
(Please notice the conditional “If you think …” that starts that paragraph.)
By contrast, if you think DPW runs a tight shop, and can find some additional constructive work to do with those newly-liberated staff hours, then at face value, the Town is paid back more-than-two-fold in terms of the value of extra work output from DPW, as a result of streamlining the leaf process and hiring $61K worth of trucking services. For that $61K, it gets back $135K with of newly-freed staff and other resources. That was the point of Post #1486.
For my part, watching the trash crews more or less run through their jobs, seeing the streets plowed in reasonable time, and finding no obvious faults with Town infrastructure beyond some occasional stretches of crumbled pavement, I have a hard time thinking that the people who manage DPW would take an additional FTE of labor and waste it.
Hence, the gist of Post #1486.
But you’d have to form your own opinion on that. I have no special insight into DPW’s management.
Isn’t the “budget cost” view an assumption of featherbedding?
My choice of the pejorative term “featherbedding” was deliberate. It helps me to highlight exactly what I think is wrong with the “budget cost” view of this issue.
There are staff and (probably) Town Council members who want to dismiss these changes by focusing narrowly on figures that will show up in the Town budget. This is what I term the “budget cost” view of this issue.
Here’s the problem with that: There is no table in the Town budget showing the value of what DPW produces for the Town. There are some bits of narrative, and recitation of tasks completed. Tons of trash collected, miles of streets swept, yards of pipe replaced, feet of sidewalk poured, and so on.
But there’s nothing in the operating budget that lets you equate the money spent on DPW to the (e.g.) value that citizens place on the services provided by DPW. And certainly nothing in the budget that says, if we give DPW more money, they’ll get more done, and if we give them less, they’ll get less done. Maybe on a project-by-project basis, but no generic input-cost-to-value-of-output table.
As a result, there’s no way to look at the budget and ask a question such as “If we gave DPW another FTE of staff, what is the value of the output that additional town employee would produce”.
And here’s where the narrow budget cost view goes off the rails. There’s an all-too-human tendency to say that if you can’t quantify it, then it doesn’t exist. There’s a tendency to say that the additional DPW output would be zero. Or, if not explicitly saying that, to make decisions that imply that. Decisions that imply that DWP will do the same amount of work, no matter how much staff time you give them.
But that’s an assumption of featherbedding. If you assume that the value of DPW’s output would not change, if you gave them more staff, that’s an assumption that they’d simply waste that additional staff time. That’s the very essence of featherbedding.
By contrast, I get the impression that DPW has a fairly large backlog of tasks waiting to be done that are waiting for the staff time and resources to do them. Just to give one example, the Town’s Transportation Safety Commission approved a pedestrian crossing light at the end of my block on 2/26/2019. Town Council approved it soon thereafter. Word is that it’s on the schedule, and we can expect to see it sometime this spring.
Either they’re extremely good at featherbedding, so that it looks as if they are busy, or the backlogs really are that long.
But my real point is to clarify the question. Do you really think that freeing up resources at DPW will produce no additional valuable output? If so, then I’d have to ask you why you think that?
Is it because you truly believe they simply produce a fixed amount of output each year? I.e., they just featherbed away any surplus time?
Or you believe that Vienna Town Council has miraculously, year-after-year, provided just exactly the right amount of funding for DPW to do its work. (And authorized the exact right number of FTEs, a number which rarely changes much from year to year).
Or, maybe, by contrast, you think that the value of output won’t change because the value of output simply is not part of the budget? The entire concept of the value of DPW’s output is simply not on your radar screen.
But the fact that there’s no table showing the value of DPW’s output doesn’t mean that it’s zero. It just means that it’s not quantified within the context of a budget document.
I think this question is important enough that Town Council should just straight-up ask DPW what more we can expect them to accomplish, if Town Council decides to simplify the leaf disposal process? What additional tasks of value to Town Citizens will DPW likely be able to do?
Given how the numbers for the proposals look, it more-or-less boils down to asking DPW what they’d do with one more FTE in their general work crew. That would be the effect of changing from the current leaf collection to Option 3 (long-haul with truck contracting).
In the end, the main point of this section is that logic runs both ways. If you think DPW routinely featherbeds, you’ll place no value on the time liberated by a more efficient leaf disposal process. You’ll assume they’ll just find a way to fritter it away. But equally, if you place no value on additional DPW outputs once the leaf disposal is simplified, then you think DPW featherbeds. (Or will, with this change).
The upshot is that if you fail to place any value on the staff time liberated by a more efficient leaf operation, then you are implying that DPW will simply waste it. You’re accusing them of featherbedding, even if you’re not saying that directly.
The opportunity cost of “free” mulch.
The downside is the proposed change in Vienna’s leaf collection methods is loss of “free” mulch in the Town of Vienna. The Town will truck 3 cubic yards of composted leaves (roughly a ton or so) to your property, at no cost to you.
Before I go any further, I want to mention that a lot of flaky stuff about these mulch deliveries was made public once the Town decided to look at this process. Arguably the flakiest of which is that a handful of Vienna residents were ordering vast amounts of mulch. Ordering and receiving 30 or 40 tons of mulch in a year. At no cost to them, fully paid for by tax dollars.
The Town ought to check with Remington Mulch and see if any one Town customer ever ordered 30 tons in a year from Remington. I’m pretty sure nobody has ever come anywhere close to that. And I’m sure of that, because you’d have to pay for that commercially-produced mulch.
I mention that, specifically, because it illustrates what people will do when something is free. You get “economic inefficiency” when you give stuff away, because people will simply take it, whether or not they place a value on it that’s higher than its actual cost of production.
To understand why this mulch isn’t free at all, you only need to look at the Town staff’s analysis of Option 1 (status quo) and Option 2 (short haul). The only difference between those two is that the Town stops grinding and delivering mulch. And the resulting estimated reduction in cost is $75,000. Which works out to an average cost of $125 per mulch delivery.
But, as with the discussion above, whether or not you believe that depends on whether you think DPW routinely featherbeds. That $75,000 saving comes mostly from reductions in staff time devoted to dealing with leaves. (The contracted services costs are the same for the two options).
If you think DPW staff will just sit on their hands for that extra time, then the value to the Town of liberating that time is zero. Under that assumption — that DPW management and staff routinely waste a lot of time, getting nothing of value done for the town — then, sure, that mulch is free, because you might as well have DPW waste their time doing that, as waste their time doing something else.
By contrast, if you think that most DPW labor and management effort produces positive and valued results for the Town, then the cost of spending that time generating and delivering mulch is the value of the other work that DPW staff could be doing. It is, as economists say, an opportunity cost. It’s the value of the other work that DPW staff could have accomplished, if they weren’t delivering 30 or 40 tons of mulch to a household, who ordered that much because the mulch was free.
And so, I come back to the same point that the logic goes in both directions. If you think that DPW routinely featherbeds, then sure, go ahead and count the mulch as free. They might as well waste their time doing that as just sitting around. But equally, if you actually do count that mulch as free, in your calculus, then you’re saying that the Town would get nothing of value by freeing up another FTE or two of DPW staff time. You’re working under the assumption that DPW will simply featherbed that time away, and the citizens of the Town will get nothing for it.
Conclusion
With a few notable exceptions, the Town Council’s last discussion of this issue did not demonstrate much grasp of the facts, or the logic behind the fully-allocated costs shown to them. Let alone have some reasoned judgment as to value.
But on top of the general lack-of-understanding, there seemed to be Town Council members who simply want that mulch to be zero cost, so that they can continue to give it away. Worse, there were some who simply want that mulch to be less-than-zero cost, that is, they want to believe that it actually saves the Town money.
All of which is flatly contradicted by the careful accounting that had been put in front of them. Yet it surely looked as if no amount of reason or logic was going to get them to give up those beliefs, and that they were well down the path of making their decisions based on whatever beliefs they walked into this process with.
Do the cost estimates as presented embody some uncertainty? Sure, all cost estimates do. Do they embody so much uncertainty as to make the ones presented essentially worthless? Nah, no reasonable person would assert that. I think. And if TC is worried, they ought to ask DPW to do some “sensitivity analysis”, for example, to see how the costs of all three options would change as the cost of fuel changes.
But at the end of the day, you have to get your head out of the details and look at the big picture. Focus on the big-ticket items. Focus on what’s obviously inefficient about the current process.
Here’s my list if what I see as the greatest inefficiencies that need to be addressed.
The number one inefficiency has to be the low-valued use of what I would conservatively estimate to be a $16M piece of prime real estate in Vienna VA. The fact is, Vienna does not have, and never has had, a good place to site a leaf dump and mulching/grinding operation within is borders. The current site is the — what, second or maybe third? — location the Town has tried over the years. And it’s not as if past moves were made for no reason.
Herndon, when faced with the same constraint, found a way to get rid of its leaves without impinging unduly on any one neighborhood. Surely Town of Vienna government can perform to the same standard as Town of Herndon.
The only option that frees up that land for some higher-valued use is the long-haul option. Take the leaves off the street, take them out to be composted on Loudoun, and be done with it.
Solution: Find somewhere else to put the leaves. That’s the only way to free up that valuable land for a better use. And the only option on the table that does that is Option 3, long haul.
The second great inefficiency is the zero price of the mulch, to Town residents. The only way that makes sense is if you believe the alternative to DPW mulch production is DPW staff just sitting around doing nothing. Otherwise, the time and effort put into mulch production costs you the value of other things DPW staff could be doing. (Such as installing pedestrian crossing lights).
Worse, a lack of a price on the mulch just encourages people to consume it, even when they value it at far below the cost of production. I doubt that the Vienna families that were ordering 30 and 40 tons of much would have done so if they were paying the Town’s estimated $125 per load cost of production. That sort of abuse of the system only exists because the lack of a price allows it to.
The obvious solution there is that if the Town insists on continuing to produce mulch, it should charge the estimated average cost of production for it. But given the unwillingness of Town Council to take much in the way of bold steps, any non-trival price, paid up front when the mulch order is placed, is better than zero.
Finally, from the standpoint of the environment,the Town should be discouraging any centralized grinding and hot-composting of leaves, in-town or otherwise. As it stands, no matter what option is chosen, all the leaves that the Town collects end up as compost. In terms of environmental “benefit” from this process, that’s pretty close to a wash no matter what the Town does.
There, the big environmental inefficiency is doing this in the first place. Collecting, grinding, and hot-composting the leaves sterilizes them, that is, kills all plant pathogens, weeds, and insect eggs and larvae that are on the leaves. That includes whole classes of beneficial insects, such as butterflies (Post #1463).
The larger the fraction of the resident population that decides to keep their leaves on their own property, the better off both the Town and the Town’s beneficial insects are. The Town has less leaf mass to collect and dispose of. And the beneficial insects have the winter cover they need to survive.
Get up away from the trivia and, to me at least, the issues are fairly clear. I don’t believe that Vienna DPW featherbeds in any major way. If that’s true, then the resources devoted to mulch production and distribution reduce DPW’s output in other areas. They do, in fact, cost the Town something. They cost the Town the valuable services that DPW would otherwise provide with that staff time. That means that mulch isn’t free, in the sense of zero cost, and giving it away creates a mis-allocation of resources. (To the point where a few families were ordering 30 or 40 tons of it in a year.) And it means that streamlining the process doesn’t result in a deadweight loss due to the cost of the purchased trucking services, it provides a return-on-investment as Town staff are redeployed to other valuable tasks.
At the end of the day, even as much as the Town Council’s discussion was infuriating at times, they did seem to get the right direction by the time the last speaker came up.
It looked like most of Town Council was not yet ready to give up on Town of Vienna mulch. Which, to me, would be the obvious best solution.
As a second-best solution,
- Charge something substantial for the mulch, so that people won’t just order it without thinking about the cost of producing it (and so that people won’t order tens of tons of mulch).
- Make people place their orders (and, not said, put down their money) ahead of time, so you know how little mulch you actually need to produce.
- Take the rest of the leaves and work out the logistics of the long-haul operation. Don’t dump them at Beulah Road.
- Encourage people NOT to put their leaves out for composting.
- And set a date certain for the time at which the Town will cease leaf dumping/grinding/composting entirely, so that the resulting land can be put to a higher-valued use.
On that last point, I would suggest that the obvious thing to do is to couple that date certain with an established set of escalating fees for the mulch. If you won’t charge the estimated average cost this year, just let it be known that you will raise the fee up to that $125 per load estimated average cost in two years. And at in the third year, you’re shutting the operation down. That way, by the time the shutdown year arrives, few people will be using Town mulch anyway.
Maybe, amid all the intellectual noise of that session, I was only hearing what I wanted to hear. It sure seemed like a lot of Town Council was uncomfortable with change, and simply longed for the good old days when they could pretend that mulch wasn’t merely free, it was actually a cost saver.
But if the Town can succeed in implementing all of those steps, even if it doesn’t get to where I think they ought to be, at least they’ll be moving in the right direction.
I guess we’ll see what viewpoint wins out.
