Letters to the Editor
Too Many Chiefs at ACS

To the Editor:

The City of New York, acting through Commissioner of Labor Relations James F. Hanley, has rendered itself less than a full-faith partner in the collective-bargaining culture of child-care and Head Start.

Despite a decades-long business communion with employees' District Council 1707 and employers' Day Care Council of New York, the Bloomberg administration has endorsed an abrupt about-face that fiscally freezes thousands of workers entrusted with the care and nurturing of our children.

Years ago, the city's Human Resources Administration, notably its Agency for Child Development (ACD), handled the implications of entanglement in the business affairs of child-care program operators by allowing the public priority of children and their caregivers to trump the tradeoffs. This even included ACD's tolerance of de facto transfers of private-sector child-care employees to rogue city payrolls.

The unusual payrolls arose when ACD - acting to protect public funds, personal livelihoods, and continuity of services - wrested direct control of financial operations from poorly performing program operators. These business management functions were then assumed by nominal ad hoc associations of city employees - ACD fiscal personnel - following a protocol that remained in effect until the issues were resolved, or until the wayward program operators were reconstituted or replaced.

Another example of "equitable entanglement" was ACD's performance as city settlement administrator for claims pursuant to Section 410-bb of the Social Services Law. The law, which enacted state grants to enhance employee salaries and benefits at child-care programs operated for not-for-profit organizations, led to ACD's involvement in the affairs of many organizations with which the city had no arrangements at all bearing on the provision of city-subsidized child care.

Consequently, the latest labor-relations crack in City Hall's foundation may be easier to explain as a public-policy aberration than it is to defend as a reasonable result of evolving labor relations.

Or maybe the aberrations are the standard operating procedures?

Consider the city's abhorrently aberrant investment in the featherbed of executives at ACD's subsuming successor, the Administration for Children's Services. The agency's 2007 organization chart labels 51 - yes, 51 - Deputy, Associate, and Assistant Commissioners, in addition to the Commissioner and Executive Deputy Commissioner.

In spite of real needs, the city has money to burn, and knows exactly how to burn it, indeed.

MARK S. TRAVITSKY, Administrative Staff Analyst (Retired)