Very interesting article...... and how many of the those 19 cities have been dominated by democrats........
EXography: 19 U.S. cities have proportionately bigger workforces than bankrupted Detroit
By LUKE ROSIAK | JULY 22, 2013 AT 2:45 PM
Detroit declared bankruptcy due in no small part to $3 billion in unfunded public employee pensions owed a sprawling city workforce that kept growing even as the city’s population shriveled, but a Washington Examiner analysis found that 19 major American cities have even bigger ratios of such workers to residents.
The Examiner used the Census Bureau's 2011 Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll to rank every U.S. city with a population of 200,000 or more.
Some of those cities managed to get along fine with comparatively few municipal employees, such as San Diego, which has 9,501 employees for 1.3 million residents, or one for every 137 residents."
But others like San Francisco had a bureaucracy seven times as large, with one of every 28 of the city's 800,000 residents on the city payroll.
Remarkably, the Census Bureau excluded from these figures all teachers and education professionals, which make up the largest group of local government employees.
The figures also do not include separate government divisions that comprise significant portions of many urban public workforces, like the 1,200-employee Baltimore City Housing Authority, the 1,000-employee Philadelphia Housing Authority and the 2,300 employee Chicago Park District.
Transit systems, such as the 9,500-worker Chicago Transit Authority and New York's 7,000-person Port Authority, are also not counted.
What's more, seven of the 19 cities with larger relative workforces than Detroit paid workers more than twice as much as the Motor City did its employees.
In different places, levels of government have different cost-sharing arrangements, with the state, county and special taxation districts for services like sewage picking up part of the tab, so these figures represent somewhat less than all of the government employees for which residents of a jurisdiction support with tax dollars.
That also means that a simple comparison of city workforces -- especially between cities in different states -- doesn't always show the full picture.
Washington, D.C. ranks first in the nation, which is no surprise to residents who recall the dramatic growth of the municipal workforce in the 1980s under then-mayor Marion Barry, who created hundreds of new positions to help reduce unemployment and encourage growth of a black upper-middle class.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/exogra...rticle/2533338