While the rest of the country enjoyed a three-day holiday weekend, the majority of City Hall employees got a bonus day. That’s because they get every other Friday off, working what’s called a “9/80” schedule, meaning they work nine days from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. On the 10th day, they stay home — supposedly.
It’s part of what’s called a “trip reduction program,” enacted by the Southern California Air Quality Management District (AQMD) in the 1990s. It requires that employers with more than 250 people at any one location must meet a mandated “average vehicle ridership” ratio. For most cities in our region, it’s an average of 1.5 persons per vehicle.
The city of Santa has exceeded that goal for the past several years — the average daily ridership for 2006 is 1.6 persons per car.
If every municipal employee working at City Hall drove to City Hall alone, they would typically generate around 2,200 trips within one week. But city employees actually generate 1,365 vehicle trips within a week. The reduction is due to carpooling and employees taking alternative transportation, according to city officials. They also chalk it up to “light Fridays” every other week.
We don’t buy it. We think it is highly unlikely that city employees spend their days off sitting at home. More than likely they run around doing errands or end up traveling. So instead of carpooling like they normally do, they are driving to the grocery store or the dry-cleaners in their own cars, thus creating more traffic on the road than if they had gone to work. And since most city employees don’t actually live here, the traffic gets worse in cities outside of Santa Monica. A bonus for us, but not for the cities where these employees live.
What’s problematic with that scenario is that the trip reduction program may have been created with good intentions, but it doesn’t solve the problem. Encouraging — or even forcing people — to carpool is clearly what works. Or so it seems in City Hall’s case.
And if City Hall is to practice its new motto of “Doing the Right Thing Right!” it ought to find ways to be fully staffed five days a week. City Hall in the past couple of years did open some of its more critical departments, like community and development, on Fridays. But we argue that if City Hall really wants to focus on customer service, it should be open every day of the week.
According to an official at the Southern California Air Quality Board, in the 180 cities in Southern California it’s estimated only a couple dozen compress their work week. Many westside cities still use some combination of the compressed work week.
What would be an even better solution is to make it so Santa Monica is a city that can accommodate people who can live and work here, instead of driving 40 miles each way to their jobs because it’s more affordable to buy a house elsewhere. Of City Hall’s 1,822 permanent employees, only 264 live in the shining city by the sea. That’s a sad statistic.
We are losing our middle-class and that could kill us in the future. City officials and elected leaders must address the mass exodus of established, knowledgeable and high-skilled workers who continue to leave Santa Monica because it’s too expensive to own property, and they are tired of commuting to and from their houses that offer yards and two-car garages.
