That doesn't seem high at all. What's you're frame of reference? State of Georgia, US (likely a small government state) Population: 9M State employees: 82k Rat

That doesn't seem high at all. What's you're frame of reference? State of Georgia, US (likely a small government state) Population: 9M State employees: 82k Ratio: 109:1 Add in county and city, and it's right in line. You can cut this various ways, but the ratio seems within the range of normal. I would like more data for comparison, but it doesn't seem unreasonable. The number of people it takes to maintain rule of law, social services, etc. is not a small undertaking and also doesn't ebb as much as the private sector due to the need for consistent levels of service. Police and fire correlate pretty tightly to population and geography (size). Similarly, licensing, inspection, etc. etc. scale with population. Tiers of management necessarily increase with increases in head count for larger municipalities at fairly standard ratios. For similarly sized populations in wealthy cities and states, I wouldn't expect extreme divergence if services provided are roughly equivalent. Phoenix, AZ is roughly the same size an Munich (1.38M) and has 17,000 city employees. That's 1 CE to 81 residents.