19 U.S. Cities Have Proportionately Bigger Workforces than Bankrupted Detroit
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Detroit declared bankruptcy due in no small part to $3 billion in unfunded public employee pensions owed to a sprawling city workforce that kept growing even as the city’s population shriveled. But a Washington Examiner analysis finds 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.
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.
The city with the leanest government is Bakersfield, Calif., which has 1,410 employees for 348,000 residents, or one for every 246. Bakersfield’s population has quadrupled in the last 40 years, and its public employee workforce may have lagged behind. The city is one of California’s most conservative and the largest that employs the lowest sales tax allowed by state law.
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