Personnel Policy Making in Times of Crisis: California Public Personnel Directors Face the Aftermath of Proposition 13

¹ The California Supreme Court later ruled the wage limitation unconstitutional. See Sonoma County Organization of Public Employees v. County of Sonoma, No. S.F. 23892 (February 15, 1979).

² All cities larger than 75,000 in population were surveyed. Two cities levied no property tax and one city contracted for all services. Since these cities were not directly affected by Proposition 13, they were excluded from the analysis.

3 See Jay M. Shafritz , Walter L. Balk , Albert C. Hyde and David H. Rosenbloom , Personnel Management in Government: Politics and Process (New York: Marcel Decker, Inc., 1978), pp. 19-24 for a brief discussion of this conception of the personnel system.

4 See E. S. Savas and Sigmund Ginsburg , "The Civil Service: A Meritless System?" The Public Interest 32 (Summer 1973): 70-85 for a case study of the independence of a civil service organization.

5 The merging of personnel administration and management has been the position of the International City Management Association for many years. See James M. Banovetz , Ed., Managing the Modem City (Washington, D.C.: Interational City Management Association, 1971), pp. 318-320.

6 See Frank J. Thompson , Personnel Policy in the City: The Politics of Jobs in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California, 1976), pp. 72-89.

and Kahn, Donald W. Wolfe, Robert Quinn and J. Diedrick Snoek , Organizational Stress: Studies in Role Conflict and Ambiguity (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), pp. 379-386.

8 Ronald Loveridge , "The City Manager in Legislative Politics" in Irwin Gertzog , ed., Readings in State and Local Governments (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970), pp. 280-289.

9 Alan Altshuler , The City Planning Process (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 1965), pp. 354-391.

10 Neal Gross , Alexander W. McEachern and Ward S. Mason , "Role Conflict and Its Resolution" in Bruce J. Biddle and Edwin J. Thomas , eds., Role Theory (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1966), pp. 287-296.

¹¹ We also examined the influence of several environmental variables. No significant relationships occurred when correlating the personnel manager's perceptions of changes in labor-management relations with population, property tax dependence prior to Proposition 13, per capita property taxes prior to Proposition 13, proportion state aid of total revenue, and days idled through labor actions per population.

¹² Weak and moderate correlations between both sets of independent variables occurred. The matrix below also shows the correlations among the sets of variables.

13 Managing Fiscal Stress: The Crisis in the Public Sector (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1980),p. 3.

14 Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1958), p. 126.

15 See Harry H. Wellington and Ralph K. Winter , The Unions and the City (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1971), pp. 7-32.

16 Similar results have occurred in a survey of city managers. See Alan L. Saltzstein , "Can Urban Management Control the Organized Employee," Public Personnel Management 3 (July-August 1974): 332-339.

and Ronald O. Loveridge , City Managers in Legislative Politics (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), pp. 93-111.

18 See Peter A. Lupsha , "Constraints on Urban Leadership, or Why Cities Cannot Be Creatively Governed" in Willis D. Hawley and David Rogers , eds., Improving the Quality of Urban Management (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1974), pp. 607-623.