The pressures to reduce our costs and to maintain services in these difficult economic times have caused many of us to look at combining departments to allow us to save money at the top of the organization by eliminating a department head.    The obvious challenge is asking a department head, whether new or existing, to assume oversight responsibilities for an additional area for which they have no prior experience.  This was illustrated when a colleague of mine shared her recent experience where a Police Chief from a previous city she had managed had called in a panic about how to handle his new responsibilities for managing recreation services.  Not only does the new Department Head often not relish the expanded duties but the direct reports struggle with a new department head that does not understand, and worse yet, in some case doesn’t value the work they do.      

An alternative to this dilemma is to consider sharing a department head with another city.  The City of Burlingame has had a number of years of experience in sharing a Parks and Recreation Director with a couple of cities.  For three years Burlingame shared a P&R Director with the neighboring City of Millbrae.   Although both City Managers supported formalizing a combined department, in the end it was decided that the savings of about $70,000 annually for Burlingame was not seen as enough to warrant the continued sharing of it’s P&R Director.   

In 2009 with the departure of the incumbent P&R Director and facing the reality of laying off park line employees the City Burlingame again considered combining departments or sharing of a P&R Director.  The relatively new Librarian didn’t relish the thought of taking on Parks and Recreation, two services in which she had no previous experience.  The City of Brisbane 8.5 miles north of Burlingame offered to share it’s P&R Director in anticipation of eliminating that position when the incumbent retired in the future.  

As illustrated in the table below, in many respects the alternatives are two sides of the same coin.  Sharing a department head with experience in their professional area has advantages for the employees that report to that department head and presumably the community receiving those services. However, that shared department head has two separate employers with two sets of meetings to attend and two sets of internal system and processes to learn.  Whereas combining services under one department head avoids the need to learn two sets of internal systems and operations, the department head now has responsibility for areas they don’t have any experience with and for employees that feel they are step children to their new department head.   

The City Manager chose sharing a Parks and Recreation Director with Brisbane and almost three years later we would offer the following observation. Doubling the amount of time a Department Head spends in regular scheduled meetings and the time involved in administering under two different internal systems along with the need to work with  two sets of employees and community members really reduces the Directors availability to all who would like a piece of their time.    

Rethinking Our Mind Set
Although one might be inclined to conclude that combining departments internally is the better alternative to reduce money spent on Department Heads, one still has to deal with the cons shown in the table above.   

Another option is to revisit our minds sets about the need to maintain separate operations, one for each city.    Burlingame’s experience would suggest that much duplication can be avoided by not just sharing the department head but also combining the P&R operation into one so that there is one staff and one internal system used for operating the department.  In addition City Managers need to revisit the value associated with department heads having to participate in each City’s Department Head and City Council meetings.   In Cities of Burlingame and Hillsborough, who jointly operate a Fire Department, the two City Managers meet together with the Fire Chief for their regular monthly meetings rather than have the Fire Chief brief them both separately.   The fire employees are under one labor contract and they moved to a common payroll, human resources, financial and budgeting system there by eliminating many of the cons listed above relative to sharing one department head and in this case middle  management team.   The benefits not only saved each city over $1.7 million per year for fire services it also enhanced the services provided to both cities.  

Note: James Nantell is the City Manager for the City of Burlingame and is the Chair Shared Services Initiative for the San Mateo County City Managers Association.