Score one for Mayor Diebold

When Mayor Diebold refused to be pushed into a hurried reorganization of the service department he was showing a leadership quality that's been rare in Newark's city administration for a long time.

He refused to go along with the plan of former mayor Bain, which would have cut three supervisory jobs and created in their stead three positions for lower cost.

Key to Diebold's rationale was this statement reported in the Advocate: "There are a lot of pieces to (the reorganization). We want to look at what (employees) actually do. Some things that they do we don’t think are needed anymore.”

Diebold seems to be working with the new service director, Kathleen Barch, to come up with real-world job descriptions that fit the city's needs.

The other shoe will drop when we see if taxpayers will get improved services for less money.

At the very least this plan is going to rise above the knee-jerk variety, and that is a monumental improvement.