The city that forgot its mission
Running a municipality shouldn't be complicated. Its role is clear. Municipalities are supposed to take care of preschools and primary schools, planning, transportation, and basic infrastructure. These are the tasks that matter most to residents in their daily lives. However, Reykjavík has increasingly moved away from this core. The administration has expanded, the number of job titles and tasks has increased, but at the same time, the overview has decreased, responsibility has become clearer, and decision-making has become heavier and slower.
The city of Reykjavík is the largest workplace in the country, with around 11,000 employees. The sheer scale of the city calls for clear priorities, a simple structure and stronger governance. When governance grows while oversight diminishes, size can work against efficiency rather than promote it.
This is reflected in the daily lives of city residents. The lack of preschool places, delays in construction, and a complex procedural environment are not a coincidence, but the result of a system that has become more burdensome than necessary.
Size and cost
Despite its size, Reykjavík does not enjoy the economies of scale that one might expect. For simple services such as garbage collection, city residents pay higher fees than residents of neighboring municipalities. When basic services are more expensive in the largest municipality in the country than in the smallest, it indicates that the system has become too complex and too costly.
At the same time, the city has accumulated projects that are far from the core role of the municipality, projects that add complexity to the system without improving service to the same extent. Reykjavík has effectively started operating one of the largest software houses in the country, with an estimated ISK 10 billion spent on digital transformation, but service is not improving.
The system is expanding, but the service is stagnant.
The operation of the city's human rights council/office costs about 300 million ISK per year, or about 1.2 billion ISK per election term. In a leadership debate in Silfrin, Pétur Marteinsson, leader of the Social Democratic Party, downplayed this cost when the Independence Party's mayoral candidate, Hildur Björnsdóttir, rightly pointed out that the human rights office should be closed down and the projects that really matter should be moved to the welfare department.
This attitude of Pétur is surprising. Hundreds of millions of krónur a year, a similar amount to the cost of running the office of the President of Iceland, is simply not a small matter. When such a cost is pointed out, it is pushed aside as if it were not important, at the expense of the taxpayers of the city. That is the problem in a nutshell. With such an attitude, the city's operations will never be put on the right track.
Responses to internal problems show the same tendency. Recently, an advertisement was published for a presence management specialist to deal with high employee absence rates. The goal is understandable, but the solution once again lies in adding a new job to the system. This does not simplify the operation, but increases the level of complexity.
It is time to reverse this trend. Fewer intermediaries, clearer accountability, and simpler administration would result in better value for money and improved service.
Reykjavík doesn't need a bigger system. It needs a simpler system and a stronger government that dares to make decisions and simplify.
