San Diego’s army of middle managers faces fierce criticism. Gloria’s top budget official is pushing back. – San Diego Union-Tribune

San Diego’s top budget official says frustration over highly paid middle managers at City Hall, which could be a key issue in upcoming budget negotiations, is fueled by exaggerations and misinformation.

An explosion in middle managers that began a decade ago has slowed dramatically, Chief Financial Officer Rolando Charvel says in a five-page memo sent to the City Council Thursday.

Charvel, who works for Mayor Todd Gloria, also contends many of the jobs either are crucial to new city initiatives, are required by state or federal mandates or don’t cost the city much because they’re grant-funded.

Charvel also stresses that the mayor has eliminated 42 middle management positions in recent years and will propose cutting 48 more on Wednesday when he unveils a proposed budget for the new fiscal year.

The memo pushes back against increasingly vocal criticism from council members, labor officials and community leaders who contend middle managers are key to the city’s budget crisis and current $120 million deficit.

The Municipal Employees Association, the city’s largest labor union, blames much of the budget crisis on a sharp jump since 2015 in the number of middle managers in roles such as program coordinators and program managers.

The MEA said last year that the number of people in those jobs, which typically pay annual salaries above $200,000, has risen from 70 in 2015 to nearly 400.

The union also complains that nearly all of the city’s middle management jobs are unclassified, meaning they are not part of the civil service system and the people in those jobs are not represented by a labor union.

In Charvel’s memo, he doesn’t dispute MEA’s numbers, but he says the increase in new unclassified middle managers has slowed dramatically, from 127 in fiscal year 2023 to 63 in fiscal 2024, 13 in fiscal 2025 and five in fiscal 2025.

He also stresses that only 106 middle managers have been added to the general fund in departments controlled by Gloria since the mayor was elected in 2020.

“Unclassified positions have become a focal point of public commentary and political debate, unfairly characterized as administrative bloat or excessive management layers,” Charvel says in the memo. “The data provided in this memorandum lays out a more precise analysis of the state of our unclassified service.”

The memo also says unclassified positions in departments controlled by the mayor make up only 3.8% of the city’s $2.2 billion annual budget, or just under $84 million.

That means if the mayor immediately eliminated every middle manager under his control, the city’s current $120 million budget deficit would shrink only to $40 million.

“Broad characterizations of the unclassified service as a driver of the city’s structural budget challenges are not supported by the data,” the memo says.

Nick Serrano, Gloria’s deputy chief of staff, says there has also been a concerted effort by the administration to discourage department heads from hiring program managers and program coordinators unless absolutely necessary.

“We’ve been increasingly asking them to think again, and think about other positions they could add,” said Serrano, noting that tactic has become more effective since the mayor demanded in December that he get to approve all new hires.

The memo contends most of the city’s middle management positions are warranted because they are crucial to new campaigns or initiatives that the mayor, council and most of the public support.

Those include reforming neighborhood planning groups, enforcing vacation-rental rules, sidewalk vending enforcement, organics recycling and parks programs for low-income residents and young people.

Many middle managers are also part of the city’s increasingly large staff focused on reducing homelessness, the memo says.

The mayor has also touted his merging of several city departments in the last two years as a successful effort to reduce middle management.

Critics say city officials prefer to hire unclassified middle managers because they can hire whoever they want with no civil service oversight, and they get to pay those workers twice as much as a classified employee would make for similar work.

When the city couldn’t offer new employees pensions from 2012 to 2021, hiring unclassified staff at high pay rates made more sense than it does today, those critics say.