Outsource study

To deal with recession-driven revenue declines, our elected officials are quick to say “everything has to be on the table” for them to balance current and future government budgets.

We’ll find out whether that’s the case at City Hall when the City Council decides whether to award a proposed contract for a study on outsourcing the operations of the Las Vegas Detention Center.

Outsourcing is usually one of the last steps taken by the public sector. Union politics and collective bargaining too often lock taxpayers into paying way more than is necessary for a particular service.

Study after study of local government wages and benefits show a number of job categories where public-sector pay far exceeds what’s paid to equivalent private-sector positions in Southern Nevada.

The process of getting unions to agree to compensation concessions has been dreadfully slow for the city. Administrators know that getting various bargaining units to agree to roll back years of unjustifiably large pay increases won’t eliminate budget deficits in the years ahead. Other options must be explored.

“This is simply a study,” Deputy City Manager Orlando Sanchez said of the detention center proposal. “This is an audit of how we operate and if it makes sense for us to go out there and see if there’s a market for a private operator.”

Oh, there’s a market, all right. Plenty of companies run jails for governments around the country. And the city already contracts out medical, linen, food, library and commissary services at the city jail, which houses only those convicted of misdemeanors, gross misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.

The city’s unionized corrections workers already are trying to scare the public into thinking the study could lead to understaffed, minimum-wage security guards being overrun by violent thugs. “Public safety should never be for sale,” the union said in a Review-Journal advertisement last month.

Perhaps the proposed study is nothing more than an attempt by city management to leverage deeper contract concessions from the corrections workers. But whatever the intentions, the City Council should approve the study. And after that, the council should launch similar studies on outsourcing park maintenance and anywhere else the city might realize savings.

After all, everything has to be on the table. Doesn’t it?