Wanted: Public Works Employees

Not exactly a compelling want ad, but in the absence of some much-needed changes, it sums up what many public works jobs will hold for the next generation of talent, experts say. Long-established shortcomings (such as a tendency to promote gruff technocrats into positions better suited for tactful managers) are part of the problem.

The main factor behind eroded working conditions is money — or, rather, the lack of it. “The challenges in government are [greater] today than they have ever been,” says Dwayne Kalynchuk, president of the 26,000-member American Public Works Association (APWA), based in Kansas City, Mo. “Doing more with less is the issue.”

Today’s lean-and-mean budgets threaten to overturn widely held assumptions about the upside of government service. “The opportunity and security of government is no longer there,” says George Winfield, director of Baltimore’s 3,600-employee Public Works Department. “Lower pay in exchange for good benefits once kept people tied to government. Now, as medical insurance and other expenses go up, government passes those costs on to its employees. There are fewer cost-of-living increases, so young people have to be really dedicated to stay with government.”

Some argue the public works profession must adapt if it is to replace rapidly retiring baby boomers with a new generation of energetic civil servants. (A recent survey of APWA’s membership revealed that 71.7 percent are over 40). Suggestions for attracting new talent include more flexible work environments, better management training, savvier public relations campaigns, faster promotion of young workers and more aggressive recruiting on college campuses. “It is incumbent upon us to try to bring along this next generation of leaders,” says Thomas Wendorf, who heads San Antonio’s 1,000-employee Public Works Department.

South Padre Island, off the Lone Star state’s southern tip, sounds like a perfect place to work — a paradise with miles of gleaming beaches lapped by the turquoise waters of the Gulf of Mexico and Laguna Madre Bay. The scenic setting, however, was not enough to convince Jeffrey Gilbert to stay on as South Padre Island’s public works director. After a year in the post, Gilbert recently resigned to become a city engineer in Harlingen, Texas.

The workload, he explains, was too much. “I started as the town engineer and director of public works,” Gilbert says. “Within six months they put health and code and animal control under my supervision as well as the building department. It was more than what I signed up for, and I really wasn’t offered any compensation.”

The degree to which public works directors are being asked to do more with less varies from community to community. Departments in cash-strapped California, for example, are particularly hard hit, says Shannon Yauchzee, director of the 75-employee Public Works Division in West Covina, a city of about 110,000. “The budgets are very tight, and a lot of our positions are being frozen, particularly in engineering and maintenance,” Yauchzee says. “We’ve had to become much smaller, much more efficient.”

Public works officials in the nation’s smallest communities face even tougher challenges than their larger counterparts, including higher operating costs, lower incomes, less in-house expertise and more difficulty complying with ever-more-demanding regulations, says Jerry Biberstine, a senior environmental engineer with the Duncan, Okla.-based National Rural Water Association.

Some of the association’s 22,000 voting members — water systems serving populations of 10,000 or less — struggle with recruiting and worry about their prospects for the future. “A lot of times, small towns finally get operators who are trained to run their water systems, but then they can’t afford to pay them enough, so the operators move on,” Biberstine says. “These smaller and poorer systems tend to have much higher turnover.”

Show me the money

However, turnover is not a small-town phenomenon. Each year, for example, Baltimore’s engineers work side by side with up to 15 college interns, some of whom later take full-time jobs with the department. “They stay with us for maybe one year, and then they’re off to the private sector,” Winfield says. What usually lures them away, he explains, is higher pay. Salaries for the lowest-grade engineers in Baltimore’s Public Works Department start at $42,300. Industry-wide, however, the highest-paid engineers with less than a year’s experience earn an average of $58,268, according to “The 2004 Engineering Income and Salary Survey,” a recently published report drawn from 14,762 responses by members of three major engineering associations.

The same survey shows that full-time salaried engineers who work for state and local governments have among the lowest median incomes — $64,490 and $70,700, respectively — compared with their peers in 27 public and private categories. (The figure for coal-industry engineers, by contrast, is $100,000.) Meanwhile, the average 2003 annual salaries for public works directors were $65,849 (city) and $75,571 (county), according to the Washington, D.C.-based International City/County Management Association.

A host of problems

If working conditions in many public works departments were not so demanding, those lower salaries would pose less of a threat to recruiting efforts, says Kalynchuk, an engineering manager with Canada’s Walton International Group. “We need to have good working environments to attract people,” he says. “When I look at the local government here in St. Albert, the No. 1 issue is stress. There aren’t enough people, and people are being overworked.” As APWA president, Kalynchuk urges today’s leaders to find ways to make life easier for their employees. Admittedly, without more money in municipal coffers, that’s a tall order.

Nonetheless, some proposed reforms would tackle the headaches caused by arcane attitudes predominant in public works. Foremost among them is the fallacy that technical ability and years of service are all someone needs to manage people, says Charles Asbury, head of the 920-person Public Works Department in Albuquerque, N.M. “That’s probably the single most important issue that public works directors struggle with,” says Asbury, who ran a private engineering firm for 35 years before joining government. “We have a progression of leaders born from longevity rather than managerial skill. The system needs to go back to square one.”

The consequences of poor management can be profound: shortsighted planning, demoralized employees, alienated residents, botched budgets, stalled projects and more. The end result is a negative work environment that repels young employees, says Alan Manning, chairman emeritus of St. Paul, Minn.-based EMA, a consulting firm that specializes in public works. “If a Gen Xer has a bad manager or supervisor, they’ll leave,” Manning says. “If they’re not respected, they’re gone.”

Manning also says public works managers must rethink autocratic, top-down approaches that discourage collaboration. “Gen Xers just won’t work that way,” he says. “The culture must start to change now.”

Amen, says Mari Garza-Bird, head of the Young Professionals Committee for the Denver.-based American Water Works Association (AWWA). Given today’s mantra of, “Do more with less,” ambitious young Gen Xers accustomed to fast-paced lifestyles can be a kind of secret weapon for public works — but only if the profession scraps its premium on longevity, she says. “It’s important to put [young talent] in key positions,” Garza-Bird says. “Even though they don’t have all the experience behind them, young employees tend to be much more energetic and committed. Too often, the traditional path meant people would say, ‘OK, I have finally gotten the position I wanted. Now I can relax.’”

Spread the word

About 80 percent of AWWA’s 57,000 members are over 40 at a time when the number of graduates choosing the water industry is tapering off, Garza-Bird says. As a result, the association has stepped up efforts to recruit younger members. Some say the public works profession needs to do the same. “You do not often see local municipalities at career fairs trying to recruit people,” Kalynchuk notes.

In addition to emulating the private sector’s aggressive approach to recruiting, public works also could benefit by taking a page from Madison Avenue and sharpening its public image, others say. In the wake of 9/11, for example, public works should have received more recognition for its crucial role in national security.

“Fire and police have been getting more money than we have because people still don’t recognize that public works is a first-responder,” Kalynchuk says. Indeed, appreciation for the services public works provides appears to be at an all-time low, in part because of widespread mistrust of government, adds Wendorf, San Antonio’s public works director.

To compete for a relatively small pool of technical talent, the profession must do more to explain to the next generation that a career in public works — while not a pathway to riches — is a rewarding and noble service. “In my mind, government service is almost like a calling,” Wendorf says. “People take for granted that when you turn on your faucet, anywhere in the United States, you’ll have drinkable water. That expectation is there — just like the trust people have when they cross a bridge that they’ll get to the other side and not fall through.”

Joel Groover is an Atlanta-based freelance writer.