This Sunday’s AJC gets their investigative mitts on a recent GSU study commissioned by the DeKalb County Commission, which states that DeKalb County has “too many managers and and almost double the number of employees as Cobb and Gwinnett counties.”

For instance…

DeKalb CEO Burrell Ellis has a staff of 24, according to county records. An additional five positions in the CEO’s staff are vacant. And the county has 30 people working in its Board of Commissioners office, including DeKalb’s seven elected commissioners.

In contrast, Cobb County Manager David Hankerson has five other people working in his office…

The GSU report recommends eliminating over 900 DeKalb County positions, and the CEO’s office doesn’t necessarily disagree, noting in a release to the AJC that downsizing is a part of the recent reorg caused by a stunted economy.  DeKalb Commissioners are also

Now of course, there’s always this caveat…

Beyond comparing DeKalb to similar governments, it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of county staffing, said GSU professor Greg Streib, one of the study’s authors. Officials from several national county government associations said there are no standards for government staffing because of their vast differences across the nation.

But that’s more of the caveat you throw out there when your county has, say, 10%-15% more employees with a similar population size.  But twice as many?