The recent fight at San Diego City Hall over how many middle managers the city employs could signal the start of a shift away from such jobs in the future, after years of their ranks quickly growing.

The battle over middle managers, which emerged during controversial budget negotiations this spring, pitted Mayor Todd Gloria against city labor leaders — and eventually most of the City Council.

Labor leaders lobbied for sharp cuts to middle management positions so the city could lay off fewer front-line workers like librarians and parks maintenance staff in its effort to close a $350 million deficit.

The Municipal Employees Association stressed that there are more than five times as many high-paid middle managers known as “program coordinators” and “program managers” at the city as there were a decade ago.

During that same time, the MEA says, the overall city workforce has grown by only 20% — making middle managers a significantly larger portion of the city’s 13,000 employees.

Gloria and his staff don’t dispute those numbers, but they released a new study in May finding that middle managers make up a smaller percentage of city staff in San Diego than in most other large cities they analyzed.

According to their study, 8% of San Diego’s workforce are middle managers — a bigger share than in San Jose, Los Angeles and New York but smaller than in Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Chicago and Austin.

Gloria’s staff also says the rise in such jobs has been necessary as the city has tackled more complex issues, expanded resident services and had to comply with more state and federal mandates.

“Growth, modernization and new programs often require the decision making, judgement and independent development of policies and procedures, and in some cases the creation of entire programs or entire departments,” said Gloria aide Alia Khouri. “These types of responsibilities are designated for unclassified management positions.”

Nearly all of the city’s middle management jobs are unclassified, meaning they are not part of the civil service system and the people in those jobs are not represented by a labor union.

The dispute over middle managers culminated last month with City Council members lobbying for cuts to those positions and eventually making some cuts themselves despite objections — and a formal veto — from Gloria.

The council cut two management jobs in the Communications Department and eliminated two of the city’s five deputy chief operating officer positions in a compromise budget it approved 7-2 on June 10.

It then reiterated its desire to cut those jobs when it overrode Gloria’s line-item veto, which had sought to restore all of those middle management jobs, in a 6-3 vote on June 23.

Gloria has so far declined to eliminate any of those management positions, even though the new fiscal year that the budget covers began July 1.

A spokesperson said the mayor does not plan to cut any positions or make any personnel decisions at the direction of the council.

“The mayor will continue making staffing decisions based on what’s needed to run a responsive and effective city government,” said the spokesperson, Rachel Laing.

She said the mayor will find cuts or savings elsewhere to cover the salaries of those workers. It’s not clear whether the council will challenge the mayor’s refusal to eliminate the jobs.

Mike Zucchet, MEA general manager, said this week that the council’s actions and the increased attention the council is giving to middle management jobs is still an important and fundamental change.

“It’s an unmistakable, seismic shift,” said Zucchet, praising other members for joining longtime middle-management critic Councilmember Vivian Moreno. “I think the level of scrutiny from the council will be much different — from the whole council, not just Councilmember Moreno.”

Since the battle began in the spring, Gloria has presented the council with many fewer requests than usual to create program manager and program coordinator positions, Zucchet said.

But the number of such jobs at the city, which typically pay between $200,000 and $250,000, has skyrocketed since fiscal year 2015 from 70 to 393 — up 461%. And the pace of the increase has accelerated, with more than 100 of those 393 positions created since fiscal 2023, Zucchet said.

“They love those positions,” Zucchet said of the mayor’s staff and city department heads. “You get to hire whoever you want, you don’t have to deal with any pesky rules, you get to pay them twice as much as you’d pay a classified employee and there’s not a lot of transparency as to what goes on with these positions.”

Khouri, a deputy chief operating officer who authored the new study comparing San Diego to other cities on middle managers, described an entirely different set of motives for the city’s hiring of so many middle managers in recent years.

San Diego needs so many because it is at the “forefront of a rapidly changing world” and is “home to innovative companies in the life science, biotechnology and research/manufacturing industries,” she said.

Governments must evolve to keep pace with the changes around them, Khouri said, and San Diego has recruited new talent in key areas to do that.

“This has primarily been enabled through the creation of new unclassified positions in the areas of data analytics, cybersecurity, cloud data storage, business intelligence, homelessness, climate change and resiliency, sustainability, mobility, talent acquisition, employee development and retention, veteran engagement and more,” she said.

Zucchet pushed back on her study’s finding that San Diego has comparatively few middle managers, contending the study is skewed by the comparison cities it uses.

Cities in Texas and Arizona have more unclassified jobs because municipal labor unions are less powerful in those states, but not all those jobs are middle management, he said. “We’re talking apples and oranges here,” he added.

He said the two most comparable cities to San Diego in the study, Los Angeles and San Jose, both employ significantly lower shares of middle managers — 6% in San Jose and 4% in L.A., compared to San Diego’s 8%.

“You could look at this study and say San Diego has twice as many as L.A. and 33% more than San Jose,” he said.

He pointed out that the mayor’s initial draft budget in April had proposed cutting 300 front-line positions, including librarians and recreation center assistant directors, and only one middle management position.

But Laing noted this week that the mayor had already consolidated some departments and made other changes last winter that reduced management staff.

”The mayor in February significantly trimmed management positions, consolidating departments to eliminate 31 management positions and $5 million from the city’s annual budget,” she said. “The mayor’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 further trimmed management positions in keeping with his commitment to optimal efficiency and fiscal responsibility.”