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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019
VOL. 101 NO. 1
CONTENTS
Celebrating
100 years HHHHHHHHHHH
F E AT U R E S
10
Timing Is Everything
Public Management magazine was first published in January 1919. ICMA members start this year-long celebration with congratulatory notes.
Page 4
Scientific evidence shows there is a right time and a wrong time to do things in our lives. Daniel Pink, Washington, D.C.
14
Opportunity Zones
A tool to help spur economic development and job creation in distressed communities. Tad McGalliard and Ashley Badesch, Washington, D.C.
18
Wanted: Police Officers The challenges that are part of hiring police officers. Gerald Young, Granville, Ohio
24
The Accessible Website Create a website that is useful to residents with a disability. Martin Lind, El Segundo, California
28
Surviving a Deadly Wildfire
Santa Rosa, California, Manager Sean McGlynn shares recovery insights. Ellen Foreman, Washington, D.C.
10 D E PA RT M E N T S 2 Ethics Matter!
A Cautionary Ethics Tale
6 Insights
32
What Is a Past Experience That Made You a Stronger Person and a Stronger Manager?
Catching up with former ICMA Local Government Management Fellows. Tanisha Briley, Cleveland Heights, Ohio
9 Inside ICMA
Where Are They Now?
36 Technology
Civic Engagement Means More Than Gathering Data
38 Commentary
Rediscovering Maslow
41 Management Manage This: How to Be an Amazing Mentor … 41
On ICMA’s Calendar
41
Leading Practice: Borrowing from Within … 42 Four Steps to Successful Resident Engagement … 44 Wellness the Right Way … 46
47 Professional Services Directory
28
The International City/County Management Association
46
J A N U A RY/ F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 9 | P U B L I C M A N A G E M E N T | 1
ETHICS
A Cautionary Ethics Tale DOCUMENTARY OFFERS INSIGHTFUL LESSONS A fundamental strategy to increase the odds that
Kevin Duggan, ICMA-CM, is director, ICMA West Coast Region, Mountain View, California (kduggan@ icma.org) and a former city manager of Mountain View.
you and your organization will avoid an ethical crisis is to avoid becoming complacent on the topic of ethics. One way of keeping ethics at the forefront of an organization’s thinking is through training—both formal and informal. If you are looking for a new and different way of providing such training, you need look no further than the documentary “All the Queen’s Horses” (currently available on Netflix and other platforms). The documentary tells the incredible story of how one rogue employee, Comptroller Rita Crundwell, embezzled an estimated $53,000,000 from the city of Dixon, Illinois (population 16,000), during a period of 20 years (equaling $3,300 per resident). Crundwell was able to perpetuate this fraud through a combination of schemes, including secret accounts and phony invoices. She carefully controlled financial information that might have revealed the fraud by requiring all bank statements only be provided to her, even making special provisions for when she was out of town. Missed Opportunities
Crundwell was able to get away with this theft over such a long period of time for many reasons, including:
International City/County Management Association icma.org January/February 2019
• • • • •
• •
Establishing relationships with staff and city leaders that resulted in an exaggerated amount of trust and a lack of sufficient oversight. Lacking a reasonable segregation of duties. Lacking reasonable checks and balances. Ignoring red flags like an extremely lavish life style, including the ownership of 400 show horses. Ignoring warnings from the city manager of a neighboring city that Dixon’s challenging financial condition was hard to reconcile with the financial condition of other area cities. Failing to do due diligence in providing oversight to the city’s financial operations. Failing in due diligence and effectiveness by the banking institution and auditing firm used by the city, including the bank not questioning the purpose of dubious bank accounts and the auditor gaining financially by providing consulting as well as auditing services to the city.
As a result of this fraud, Dixon suffered in a variety of ways, including years of artificial financial challenges, unnecessary service reductions, and deteriorated infrastructure. Once the fraud was finally discovered, the city’s fiscal mismanagement resulted in the community suffering national embarrassment, a loss of trust among its residents, and eventual public repudiation of the elected leadership through the ballot box. While “too little too late” to make up for years of negative impacts, the city was able to recover some of its losses through the sale of the previous comptroller’s assets and legal settlements with the bank and auditing firm. None of
Public Management (PM) (USPS: 449-300) is published monthly except February by ICMA (The International City/County Management Association) at 777 North Capitol Street. N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002-4201. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C., and at additional mailing offices. The opinions expressed in the magazine are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of ICMA. COPYRIGHT 2019 by the International City/County Management Association. All rights reserved. Material may not be reproduced or translated without written permission. REPRINTS: To order article reprints or request reprint permission, contact bpayne@icma.org.
2 | P U B L I C M A N A G E M E N T | J A N U A RY/ F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 9
By Kevin Duggan, ICMA-CM
SUBSCRIPTIONS: U.S. subscription rate, $46 per year; other countries subscription rate, $155 per year. Printed in the United States. Contact: 202/289-4262; subscriptions@icma.org. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Public Management, ICMA, 777 N. Capitol Street, N.E., Suite 500, Washington, D.C. 20002-4201. ARTICLE PROPOSALS: Visit icma.org/pm to see “Editorial Guidelines” for contributors. For more information on local government leadership and management topics, visit icma.org.
this, however, made up for years of unnecessary negative service and infrastructure impacts and the loss of public confidence in the city organization. A necessary and positive reform was a transition from the commission to the council-manager form of government and more professional management of all city operations, including financial. One lesson not to take from this story: A similar situation could not happen in a “professionally managed” community. The film documents that most frauds are eventually uncovered as the result of a whistleblower willing to report his or her suspicions. Are your employees clear regarding organizational expectations around the importance of reporting unusual or questionable circumstances? Lessons Learned
Here are lessons to consider from this story: • While we hopefully trust employees, trust is no substitute for having essential checks and balances relating to all fiduciary responsibilities. • Even long-tenured and highly regarded employees can put the organization at risk without sufficient oversight and due diligence. • High standards and expectations for other institutions that relate to the organization’s financial oversight (i.e., banks, auditors, underwriters, legal counsel) are mandatory. Regularly evaluate and monitor their performance. • Avoid complacency. Just because there has not been a problem doesn’t mean you don’t (or won’t in the future) have a problem. • Make it clear to all employees that it is their responsibility to report behavior or situations that appear questionable/suspicious—even if they can’t determine with certainty that there is a problem. Employees need to know that they will be protected from any negative consequences for reporting their suspicions. Public Management (PM) icma.org/pm ICMA 777 North Capitol Street, NE Washington, DC 20002-4201 EDITORIAL OFFICE: 202-962-3619, bpayne@icma.org ADVERTISING SALES: 202-367-2497; Tilman Gerald, The Townsend Group, Inc., tgerald@townsend-group.com ICMA MEMBER SERVICES: 800.745.8780 | 202.962.3680 | membership@icma.org
• •
Provide employees with a variety of avenues to report suspected problems—not just through the normal “chain of command.” When suspicious behavior is reported, exercise due diligence in investigating the facts. A cursory examination may not be sufficient. Those committing fraud have often developed elaborate cover stories in anticipation that they might one day need to explain suspicious circumstances.
Increasing Awareness
While the experience of Dixon is particularly dramatic, there are many other unfortunate examples in generally well-regarded and otherwise effectively managed council-manager communities. While the specific circumstances may not be similar, the type of behaviors that allowed this fraud to be perpetuated and to remain undiscovered can occur THE FILM in any organization. DOCUMENTS THAT Showing the documentary to your staff and having a discussion MOST FRAUDS regarding what allowed this fraud to be ARE EVENTUALLY perpetrated and what lessons can be transferred to your organization, can UNCOVERED AS be useful in increasing awareness for THE RESULT OF A both yourself and your organization. At a minimum, it communicates that you WHISTLEBLOWER and the organization do not take ethical WILLING TO conduct and honesty for granted. The Illinois City/County Management REPORT HIS OR Association has already used this film HER SUSPICIONS. to raise awareness of potential pitfalls among its members. As long as you avoid the temptation of taking false comfort by concluding “it couldn’t happen here,” or “we are certainly smarter/more competent than they were,” you and your staff will increase the odds of avoiding similar, if less dramatic, ethical challenges.
ICMA Creating and Supporting Thriving Communities ICMA’s vision is to be the leading association of local goverment professionals dedicated to creating and supporting thriving communities throughout the world. It does this by working with its more than 12,000 members to identify and speed the adoption of leading local government practices and improve the lives of residents. ICMA offers membership, professional development programs, research, publications, data and information, technical assistance, and training to thousands of city, town, and county chief administrative officers, their staffs, and other organizations throughout the world. Public Management (PM) aims to inspire innovation, inform decision making, connect leading-edge thinking to everyday challenges, and serve ICMA members and local governments in creating and sustaining thriving communities throughout the world.
ICMA Executive Director Marc Ott ICMA President
Karen Pinkos, ICMA-CM City Manager El Cerrito, California
Editor
Beth Payne bpayne@icma.org
Newsletter Editor
Kathy Karas kkaras@icma.org
Art Director
Erika White ewhite@icma.org
Design & Production
picantecreative.com
J A N U A RY/ F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 9 | P U B L I C M A N A G E M E N T | 3
100
Celebrating PM
is celebrating a significant milestone this year, as it recognizes 100 years of publication, beginning with its debut as the City Manager Bulletin in January 1919. Beginning with this issue and continuing throughout the coming months, the magazine will highlight past covers, people, contents, and events. From these snippets, readers might find that some aspects of the magazine’s contents have not changed that much. This issue includes messages from two respected ICMA members who, over the years, also have been PM contributors and readers.
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years My Regards to PM I think so much of the ICMA organization and of Public Management (PM) magazine. I go back a long way with ICMA—to former executive directors Clarence Ridley, Orin Nolting, Bill Hansell, Mark Keane, my idol Bob O’Neill, and now Marc Ott. The organization, along with the magazine, has meant a great deal to me throughout my career, and I have tried to give back a little by contributing to both while as a manager and at the LBJ School in Austin. I particularly enjoy reading Public Management for (1) the insightful articles penned by motivational and leadership writers—and not incidentally, current ICMA staff members—who constantly challenge managers and others of us who work in a number of professions, and (2) the columns and articles by current managers who give us the benefit of how they face and solve the everyday problems that all communities face. I am holding out for the ICMA conference in San Antonio in 2023 to celebrate my 100th birthday in my favorite city. Congratulations to PM for reaching its 100th milestone in 2019! Y’all keep ginning out PM. It’s the best trade magazine in the world, and I still look forward to receiving it every month! —Terrell Blodgett, Mike Hogg Professor Emeritus in Urban Management, LBJ School – University of Texas, Austin (blodgett@utexas.edu).
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PM Reflections Congratulations to PM on its 100th year of publication. For my formal city management education, I relied on the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania. That education was thorough and contained many managerial and supervisory instructional exercises. But for most of my management processes and practices training, I depended on articles in PM. Those articles had stories of work projects that had beginning and ending explanations. The stories told how it was done and what was the level of success and/ or failure. Invariably, the stories told of the involvement of elected officials, department personnel, community organizations, and individual residents. And the stories’ authors were usually people you could pick up the telephone and query directly. I gained a lot personally from having PM as a tool. I regularly referenced PM during executive staff meetings in each of the cities I served as administrator or managed: Inkster, Michigan, 1970–1973; Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1973–1979; Cincinnati, Ohio, 1979–1985; and San Diego, California, 1985–1986. I also used the magazine as a training tool for city employees. I especially remember using it with the middle management training sessions in the city of Cincinnati. The Personnel Training Division usually copied it for training classes, and I certainly referred to it when I spoke to the classes. We were able to improve our work product in Cincinnati based on articles we had read. A BIG SALUTE TO PM! —Sylvester (Sy) Murray, Professor of Urban Studies and Public Administration, Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio (symurray611@gmail.com).
During 2019 July 2008
CELEBRATIN ICMA is pleased to introduce G a new design for Public M MT Management (PM) magazine EN with this issue in recognition of its 100th anniversary. All of the changes you will see during 2019 have been developed over the past M several months and reflect MT the work of ICMA’s Creative EN and Outreach Team members. INSIDE
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—Lynne Scott, director, Member Publications, ICMA (lscott@icma.org).
J A N U A RY/ F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 9 | P U B L I C M A N A G E M E N T | 5
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INSIGHTS
We asked our readers »
What was the last experience [management or otherwise] that made you a stronger person and a stronger manager?
John Petrin, ICMA-CM
Ghida Neukirch, ICMA-CM
Alfonso Noyola, ICMA-CM
Town Administrator Burlington, Massachusetts jpetrin@burlmass.org
City Manager Highland Park, Illinois gneukirch@cityhpil.com
City Manager Boulder City, Nevada anoyola@bcnv.org
I will be retiring in March after 40 years, so I am providing a holistic answer to this issue’s question. My strength comes from my marriage to my wife, Kim. She is the love of my life and soul mate and is at the core of my capacity to maintain a positive approach to both my life and work. I went through a difficult time in my last position seven years ago. I had wonderful support from my assistant, colleagues, and many others whom I will always cherish. Kim, however, was the one who took the real brunt and had to shoulder the responsibility of me personally getting back on track. I always say that no matter what happens, as long as I can go home and have Kim’s love and support, I can be the manager I need to be to lead my organization.
I feel the greatest success when there is a high level of trust with our city’s elected officials and there is great synergy among city staff. This foundation is tested with every emergency incident. Our region, for example, has been increasingly impacted with flash flooding. The city is forced to close roads and deal with a high volume of public calls of concern. As a result of proactive planning and outstanding collaboration among our team, staff members work well together to take care of emergencies. Although each department has its respective responsibilities, employees are committed to supporting each other and serving the public. All modes of communication are used to provide daily updates to residents. Elected officials forward inquiries and support staff in their responses to the public, and we are a better organization because of the trust and synergy.
Communications is an extraordinarily vital role of a city manager. Boulder City (population 16,000) has been through several high-profile issues leading to a sense of mistrust of city hall. The community’s negative reaction, in large part, was due to a lack of clear, concise, and proactive communications. As the newly hired city manager, I worked diligently with the council to establish a comprehensive communications program: to speak with one voice, to commit to open and transparent government, to receive feedback, and to address issues promptly. Residents, media, business owners, neighboring communities, and other stakeholders need to hear from their government regularly. We have greatly improved communications by responding promptly to media requests, boosting our social media presence, issuing regular news releases and advisories, and increasing internal communications. Residents are getting concise, factual information faster, resulting in a sense of connection with city hall.
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Inside ICMA January is National Mentoring Month, a campaign that aims to raise awareness about the need for more mentors as well as encourage more people to actively become mentors. This month, we are spotlighting two ICMA members and sharing their thoughts on having the support of a mentor and being mentored.
Darrin Tangeman, ICMA-CM, city manager, Woodland Park, Colorado
“I will say that had I not had a mentor it would have been a very difficult transition for me from the military to local government. I reached out to a veteran who is also a manager, Bill Ebel, city manager, Overland Park, Kansas. It was incredibly helpful to talk with him about his experience and his transition. So, I believe that a mentor is invaluable.”
“A mentor is someone who kind of takes you under their wing. I think that the best mentors I’ve had so far are the city manager and assistant city manager of Olathe. They’re both vetted, they know what they’re doing, and they’re excellent at it. I think what’s been the most educational for me is to learn that emotional quotient and how to make those big decisions in a professional matter. I feel so privileged and blessed to be able to work for them, and I consider both mentors.”
Create Connections through Coaching! icma.org/coaching
ICMA’s National Coaching Program offers a suite of services to help you grow, make decisions that benefit your career, gain perspective from others, and achieve your goals. Check icma.org/coaching for: Free Coaching Webinars
icma.org/coachingwebinars Coaching Resources
icma.org/coaching-resources-faqs Talent Development Shawna Davis, budget and performance analyst, Olathe, Kansas
icma.org/talent-development 1 to 1 Coaching
icma.org/1 to1-coaching The NEW ICMA Coach Connect uses
View more online at icma.org/spotlight-members and YouTube video site at http://bit.ly/mentorplaylist.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR Upcoming Events icma.org/events
March 22: Application deadline for the Emerging Leaders Development Program: icma.org/eldp. New to local government? We are accepting applications for the spring class. March 29: Application deadline for the Mid-Career Managers Institute: icma.org/mcm. April 3: Next deadline to apply for ICMA Credentialed Manager status: icma.org/credentialing.
2019 ICMA Regional Conferences: A two-day learning experience with career-building, mentoring, and leading ideas to help local government professionals and their communities thrive. For details, visit icma.org/icma-regional-conferences. outheast Regional Conference S February 27–March 1 | Greenville, South Carolina West Coast Regional Conference March 20–22 | Reno, Nevada ountain Plains Regional Conference M March 27–29 | Omaha, Nebraska Northeast Regional Conference April 3–5 | New Brunswick, New Jersey I nternational Regional Conference April 18–22 | Timisoara, Romania Midwest Regional Conference May 8–10 | Evanston, Illinois
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Legacy Leaders is an ICMA program designed to encourage credentialed managers to mentor the next generation of local government professionals. Find out more at icma.org/legacyleaders.
J A N U A RY/ F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 9 | P U B L I C M A N A G E M E N T | 9
TIMING Is
EVERYTHING
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Take It from Popular ICMA Keynoter Daniel Pink nowing that Daniel Pink’s keynote presentation at ICMA’s Annual Conference in September 2018, “The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing,” was so well received by ICMA members in attendance, PM magazine asked him to share his research and findings on the importance of timing in a person’s life, which is the subject of his latest bestselling book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.
PM
magazine: In your book, you emphasize that the time of day someone does things may be one of the most important factors to consider in how people perform on the job. What are some ways that local government managers can apply this wisdom when leading staff members? Daniel Pink (DP): The key is to understand what’s go-
ing on—and then to respond to it. The most important insight from the science for managers is that people’s cognitive abilities do not remain static over the course of the day. Our brainpower changes in predictable, and sometimes dramatic, ways. So what managers should do is allow people to do the right work at the right time. In particular, most of us move through the day in three stages: a peak, a trough, and a recovery. During the peak, we should be doing analytic work—work that requires head-down focus and attention. Think writing a report or crunching numbers. During the trough, we should be doing administrative work—work that doesn’t require intense analysis or creativity. Think answering routine e-mails. During the recovery, we should be doing insight
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work—work that benefits from being a little mentally loose and creative. Think brainstorming. Most of us move through the day in this order: peak in the morning, trough in the early to midafternoon, and recovery in the late afternoon and early evening. But about 20 percent of us—people who have “evening chronotypes”—don’t follow this pattern. Night owls tend to reach their peak late in the afternoon and into the evening. If managers can get people doing the right work at the right time, they’ll see better performance and higher satisfaction. PM: On a larger scale, how can local government managers use these principles to help make life better for the residents they serve? DP: The science of timing isn’t only about
what happens over the course of a day. Another dimension is understanding how much of our lives are episodic. Most of our experiences—from projects to careers to relationships—have beginnings, middles, and ends. And each of these stages exerts a different influence on our behavior. So, when thinking of residents’ encounters with government, including everything from a visit to the department of
motor vehicles, a public park, or the mayoral town hall, keep this in mind: Being intentional about beginnings, midpoints, and endings can make a world of difference. For instance, the science shows that endings have a profound effect on both motivation and memory. Raising the salience of an ending can get people to move. So if you’re setting deadlines for residents, shorter deadlines, which might seem unfriendly, are often more effective than longer ones. Local government managers should also remember that how an encounter ends hugely
affects how people encode it. So being deliberate about ending encounters with city hall on a positive note can shape how people view government services. PM: How would you suggest managers help elected officials think about the importance of timing? Is the importance of timing as crucial as getting policy recommendations correct? DP: Getting the timing right on
policies isn’t more important than the policies themselves. But smart officials should factor it in. For instance, certain dates
operate as what researchers call “temporal landmarks.” They stand out in time the way physical landmarks stand out in space. They get us to slow down—and then to perform a peculiar kind of mental accounting. On these “fresh start dates,” we relegate our old imperfect selves to the past and open up a fresh ledger on our new better selves. This is why you’re more likely to start— to be successful in sustaining— a new diet, exercise plan, or work approach if you start it on a Monday rather than a Thursday, the first of the month
rather than the 13th of the month, or on the day after your birthday rather than the day before your birthday. If officials want to change resident behavior, launching a new policy on a fresh start date might give them a better chance at having the behavior begin and eventually stick. PM:Your research is persuasive on the importance of mentally restful breaks. How do local government professionals create this type of culture in a fish bowl where rest may be perceived as waste? »
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DP: That’s a good point.
We still have a bias against breaks. But in my view, the science of breaks is where the science of sleep was a decade ago—about to break through the surface and recalibrate our understanding of what it takes to be effective. There are two key insights from the research. First, breaks
PM: The magazine is celebrating its 100th year, and ICMA is turning 105, in 2019. What should we take from such an enduring legacy? DP: You’re doing something
right! What’s more, it shows that government managers always want to know about best practices and how to do
Third, especially here in the United States, is political polarization and its effect on local governance. What will be the balance of power and responsibility between federal and local government and between state and local governments when Americans are becoming much more politically segregated? PM: Is there any other message that you’d like local government managers to consider and apply to their workday and to their personal lives? DP: Two of them. First, be
are not a deviation from high performance. They’re part of high performance. Breaks are what professionals do. Only amateurs look down on breaks. Second, we know a lot about the sorts of breaks that are best at restoring mood and boosting productivity. We know that breaks when we move—say, talking a walk—are more restorative than those when we’re not moving. Breaks in nature, like simply going outside, are especially powerful. And there’s a bunch of research that shows that breaks are more effective when we’re fully detached—not semidetached. So, I wouldn’t advocate that everyone in local government take a daily nap. But I would argue that if every local official took a 15-minute walk break each afternoon, taxpayers would benefit.
their jobs well. If some of this science of timing can help them, then all the better! PM: What are some issues to keep in mind as PM, and the local government profession, look toward the next 100 years? DP: I don’t know about the
next 100 years, but over the next 10 or 15 years it seems like three issues will move to the front burner. One is inequality—particularly, the growing sense that the 21st century economy is leaving many people behind. Second is reckoning with what could be a substantial increase step change in machine and software intelligence. That will produce many opportunities for local government to do its job better; however, of course, it could also create other upheavals for officials.
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much more strategic about scheduling meetings. People spend a huge amount of time in meetings. But the only criterion organizations use in scheduling them is availability. That’s a big mistake. Figure out what kind of meeting it is: Do the people attending need to be locked down and analytical? More open and freewheeling? Or is the meeting purely administrative? And who’s going to be there? Larks, owls, or a mix? The “when” of meetings isn’t a purely logistical decision. It’s also a strategic one. Second, as we discussed before, take more breaks and take the right kinds of breaks. PM: While you were at the ICMA conference in September, were you able to talk one-to-one with managers and, if so, what concerns did they raise with you? DP: Several people wanted
to know how to figure out someone’s chronotype—that is, whether they’re a lark or an owl. There are two instruments (questionnaires) that they can find online:
The Munich Chronotype Questionnaire (MCTQ) and the Morning-Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ). There’s also a back-of-theenvelope method. It begins by thinking of what chronobiologists call a “free day.” A day when you don’t have to wake up to an alarm clock and can go to sleep and wake up whenever your body tells you. First, think about what time you’d go to sleep on one of those free days. Second, think about what time you’d wake up. Third, figure out the midpoint of your sleep. If the midpoint is before 3:30 a.m., you’re probably a lark. If it’s after 5:30 a.m., you’re probably an owl. And if it’s in-between 3:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., you’re probably in the middle, and what I call “third bird.” So, for me, I’d typically go to sleep at midnight and wake up at 8 a.m., making my midpoint of sleep 4 a.m. and identifying me as a third bird. PM: What is one timesaving (or “aid-to-bettertime-spent”) app or hack you would recommend to students and early careerists? DP: Each morning, take care
of one extremely important task before answering e-mail. Responding to e-mail first thing in the morning is one of the most productivitydestroying things white collar workers do. Daniel Pink is the author of six books on the subjects of business, work, and behavior, the most recent of which is When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (Riverhead Books, 2018). He lives in Washington, D.C.
Two Scholarships
will be awarded to ICMA members to attend the 2019 Harvard Kennedy School Senior Executives in State and Local Government Program.
Criteria:
• Must be an ICMA member. • Must meet other scholarship criteria. • Application deadline: January 31, 2019.
Apply at icma.org/harvard Scholarships made possible through the generosity of ICMA Presidential Partners.
Opportunity
W
ZONES
hen talking about the local economic ecosystems of the future, Ed Cohen-Rosenthal, an advocate for environmental issues, used to say: “After 40 years I finally understand chemistry, it’s all about bonds broken and bonds made.” He was guided by a model suggesting that the role of government in economic development, particularly in distressed communities, is to create the appropriate chemistry of policy and programmatic bonds that can lead to good jobs, sustainable economic activity, and more livable communities. Taking his cue from urbanist Jane Jacobs, Cohen-Rosenthal described communities, cities, and regions as the “nexus” of opportunity, with the prerequisites of market access, transportation nodes, infrastructure, raw materials, financing, and labor. When those elements come together as a refined package, competitive advantages can be realized.1 Unfortunately, many communities do not possess the necessary bonds and preconditions for economic and workforce development success. The reasons are too numerous to detail, and each community, city, or region can point to a variety of factors that has led to its stagnation. BY TAD MCGALLIARD AND ASHLEY BADESCH
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In most places, whether prosperous or in need of revitalization, economic development is often a top priority. In fact, in survey after survey, ICMA members indicate that economic development is at the pinnacle of priorities of the governmental enterprise that they oversee. In 2017, new federal legislation created another tool, fueled by tax incentives, for local economic development—the Opportunity Zones program. Tax Policy and Economic Development Tax policies are a sizable bucket of tools that local
governments often use to retain existing enterprises and to attract new investments. Tax abatements, tax exemptions, and tax-increment financing are common strategies alongside such other approaches as tax credits, deferrals, stabilization strategies, and even accelerated depreciation of fixed assets, including equipment. And while economic development is primarily a state and local issue, the federal government has played a key role in supporting local economic development activities for nearly four decades. Starting in the 1980s, federal agencies began to examine a va-
riety of market-based programs that leveraged tax strategies to advance growth and prosperity in economically challenged or distressed communities. The enterprise zone concept began in Great Britain as a strategy to reverse decades of high poverty rates and unemployment. The Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 and the Finance Act 1980 ushered in the first wave of enterprise zones that featured property tax exemptions, deductions of corporate and income taxes, reductions in administrative requirements, and other fiscal and policy benefits for investors in areas
that had undergone significant decline in economic activity. Inspired by the model in the United Kingdom, President Ronald Reagan pushed for market-based, national-level, enterprise zone legislation in the United States. Those efforts proved unsuccessful at the federal level as Congress defeated a sequence of bills during his presidency. Within a few years, however, many state governments began to pass their own legislation to designate locations, incentives, and guidelines for enterprise Âť
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zones within their boundaries. By the 1990s, at least 40 states had passed some version of enterprise zone legislation. In the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots in 1992, and recognizing the ongoing decline of major urban areas, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which created the Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community program. It provided tax incentives and credits for businesses that would expand their operations in certain designated communities. New Market Tax Credits (NMTCs) are another federal tax strategy providing incentives to investors who make investments in certified community development entities that fund economic development in low-income communities. NMTCs have been used in a variety of ways for new development in low-income places, including redeveloping formerly used properties commonly referred to as brownfields sites. The most recent federal initiative using market-based, tax policy approaches to spur investment in low-income communities is the Opportunity Zones program. In 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was signed into law providing the enabling legislation for this emerging federal economic and community development program. Simply put, this new program provides a vehicle for investors to invest in “opportunity funds.” These funds will, in turn, invest their resources into opportunity zones that have been designated across the country. How the Program Works According to a report from the Economic Innovation
Group (EIG), a leading voice on opportunity zones, more than 50 million Americans live in economically distressed communities.2 Even within the same city, many neighborhoods have been left behind by the economic recovery following the Great Recession. Concentrated distress within communities generates a downward spiral of stagnation, shrinking tax base, and lack of access to capital for revitalization. Through changes to the federal tax code, the Opportunity Zones program seeks to unleash an estimated $2.3 trillion of unrealized capital gains on stock and mutual funds that are locked up due to reluctance to pay capital gains taxes.3 The program’s tax incentive enables individuals and corporate taxpayers to defer capital gains on the sale of stock, assets, and other property by investing the proceeds into a certified opportunity fund that provides equity to businesses or projects within designated, distressed communities. To realize the deferment, the gains from the sale of an asset must be invested in one of the funds within 180 days of the transaction. The program
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spurs long-term investments of “patient” capital by providing the greatest benefits to investors who hold their investments for 10 years. Chief executives of states, territories, and the District of Columbia nominated up to 25 percent of qualifying census tracts within their jurisdictions, focusing on tracts that have at least a 20 percent poverty rate or a median income that is less than 80 percent of the state, region, or metropolitan area median income to be designated opportunity zones. The U.S. Department of Treasury approved more than 8,700 such designations across the United States as of March 2018.4 According to an EIG analysis, the average poverty rate among the designated opportunity zones is 31 percent and the median income is only 59 percent of its area median, both of which are substantially above the thresholds required by law.5 Qualified funds are defined as “any corporation or partnership organized for the purpose of investing in qualified opportunity zone property and that holds at least 90 percent of its assets in such property.”6 In general, an “opportunity zone property” is one that
conducts the majority of its business within the designated opportunity zone and is a business with most of its tangible property owned or leased within the zone. One interesting feature of this new program is the lack of reporting requirements for opportunity fund investments, somewhat echoing the original, underlying “nonplan” theory of enterprise zones conceptualized in Great Britain that suggested administrative and planning restrictions in designated zones be minimized or eliminated.7 There remains some uncertainty if future rounds of regulations from the federal government will include more detailed reporting requirements. The To-Do List for Managers The opportunity zone effort has followed a familiar intergovernmental path for local jurisdictions. The program has been legislated at the federal level with zones designated by states likely with a relatively modest level of local input. Now, as the program is coming closer to
actualization, how do local governments and local government managers prepare to take advantage of this new opportunity? First, they need to get up to speed. The purpose of this article is to give a basic primer about the program and some of its historical antecedents. There is, however, much more to learn about the nuances of the program as it continues its rollout. Further, since local governments will be the primary beneficiaries, it is important that they are as fluent as they can be about the possibilities the program offers. The EIG website (https://eig.org) is the best source of up-to-date information on the program. Localities should also
programs might be further refined given opportunity fund investors indicating interest in designated zones. Local brownfields sites programs, land banking efforts, and other activities focused on formerly used commercial and industrial properties might also benefit from the Opportunity Zones program, so it will be important to make sure that these efforts are integrated into any strategic planning efforts. Local governments should also think about how to effectively align the public and private partners that typically work with the jurisdiction on economic development activities, including chambers of commerce, community foundations, investor-owned
The Opportunity Zones program might also be reason enough to conduct a retention and expansion survey of the local business community, including those already located and operational in a designated zone. Through the survey, a local government can gauge the level of interest and understanding by the local business community about the zone program, especially those that could be considering expansion and looking for capital to do so. ICMA data indicates that more than half of communities use promotional and advertising activities to highlight their area’s amenities for attracting new development. Updating websites, brochures, and other media is a good idea to
ACCORDING TO AN EIG ANALYSIS, THE AVERAGE POVERTY RATE AMONG THE DESIGNATED OPPORTUNITY ZONES IS 31 PERCENT AND THE MEDIAN INCOME IS ONLY 59 PERCENT OF ITS AREA MEDIAN, BOTH OF WHICH ARE SUBSTANTIALLY ABOVE THE THRESHOLDS REQUIRED BY LAW.5 explore whether any opportunity funds are forming in their state, region, or jurisdiction or if any have their investment sights set on the zones in their community. Qualified opportunity funds can be managed by a variety of types of organizations, so it will be important for local governments to get to know these new financial and investment stakeholders. The Opportunity Zones program allows local governments to align planning, strategy, and project priorities that may be under way, or nearing start-up implementation. Any investments such as infrastructure improvements, investments in educational institutions, and workforce development training
and municipal utilities, colleges and universities, economic development corporations, nonprofit organizations, resident groups and commissions, as well as neighboring or surrounding jurisdictions like a county government. Ensuring that all traditional economic development partners are fully up to speed on the Opportunity Zones program should be a priority so that everyone is speaking from the same set of talking points and strategies. Local governments should consider convening these stakeholders with investors, developers, financial institutions, wealth advisers, and tax experts to share information and position potential projects for investment.
account for the designated opportunity zones in your community. Given that local jurisdictions can often offer financial and nonfinancial incentives to trigger retention or attraction of businesses, they may consider developing companion incentives to encourage investment in their designated opportunity zones. Similarly, local governments should consider close coordination with state agencies to see what additional state-level incentives might be layered on as well to attract attention. Many states are considering incentive layers to enhance attraction to their multiple, local opportunity zones. Opportunity zones are another in the long line of
federal programs to spur investment in low-income communities by using tax and other incentive strategies. Various analyses indicate mixed success with previous efforts, including empowerment and enterprise community designations. Despite the historical ebb and flow, however, local governments and their managers should be fully aware of the possible benefits of the program. Now is the time for local governments to build the bonds necessary for this new economic and investment opportunity. 1 Cohen-Rosenthal, Ed and Judy Musnikow, 2003. “What is Eco-Industrial Development” in Eco-Industrial Strategies, Greenleaf Publishing Limited (pages 14–30). 2 https://eig.org/news/ investing-opportunity-actfactsheet. 3 https://eig.org/news/ investing-opportunity-actfactsheet. 4 The national map of census tracts designated as opportunity zones can be found at a U.S Department of Treasury website (https:// www.cdfifund.gov/Pages/ opportunity-zones.aspx). 5 https://eig.org. 6 “Investing in Opportunity Act” (H.R. 828/S.293). 7 Wetherell, Sam, 2016. Freedom Planned: “Enterprise Zones and Urban NonPlanning in Post War Great Britain” in Twentieth Century British History, Volume 27, Number 2, (pages 266–289). Tad McGalliard is director, Research and Development, ICMA, Washington, D.C. (tmcgalliard@ICMA.org), and Ashley Badesch is principal, Sustainable Strategies, Washington, D.C. (ashley.badesch@ strategiesdc.com).
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WANTED: POLICE OFFICERS ICMA Study Explores Recruitment Issues What skills are most important in hiring police officers? How are local governments conducting recruitments, and what methods seem to work best? These questions were the subject of a survey conducted by the International City/ County Management Association (ICMA), pursuant to an agreement with the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera), to gather information from a range of local government staff inside and outside the police department, as well as residents, each sharing different perspectives from among 28 cities and counties around the country. There were 193 total respondents, for an average of 6.9 per jurisdiction.
The survey was designed to ask a core set of questions of all respondents, with a list of additional questions provided to management, the police chief, and human resources. Recruiting Challenges In the current period of low unemployment, competition with the private sector, as well as societal changes in the perception of policing and of public service generally, may be combining to decrease the supply of police officer applicants. A 2018 workforce study by the Center for State and Local Government Excellence (SLGE) noted that the percentage of state and local governments rating police officers as “hard to recruit� positions has grown from 3.3 percent in 2009 to 26.5 percent in 2018.1 Among the respondents to this
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survey, the average vacancy rate in the police department is 7 percent, which means that authorized positions may be going unfilled. Given such findings, it is important to consider how to conduct a successful recruitment process by finding the right matches for the jurisdiction’s organizational culture and priorities. Policing Priorities Respondents were asked to rate the importance of various priorities (see Figure 1), with 10 representing very important, and 1 representing not at all important. Of these activities, some are what might be considered the meat-and-potatoes of policing,
BY GERALD YOUNG
namely reducing crime (8.97) or direct patrols (7.94). Others might fall into the categories of community-oriented policing (e.g., building community trust and foot patrol) or the broken-windows approach (e.g., responding to code violations). In the latter case, attention is paid to seemingly minor infractions that may either be harbingers of larger issues or signal a level of toleration of inappropriate behavior that encourages more of the same. The highest rating was afforded to building community trust. Some might view this as a softer, nonprofessional goal, and attribute the score to responses by civilian community members. This priority, however, was actually rated
Figure 1. Model Police Officer Priorities (Asked of All Staff and Community Respondents). Building community trust De-escalation Reducing violence Reducing crime Solving problems Identifying problems Resolving domestic violence conflicts Investigating suspicious circumstances/persons Participating in training/education Hot spot policing Responding to mentally ill individuals in crisis Conducting training/outreach in the community Responding to accidents Direct patrols Responding to disabled individuals in crisis Resolving conflicts between strangers Resolving conflicts between acquaintances Conducting traffic or pedestrian stops Foot patrol Crowd control Responding to noise complaints Responding to blocked driveways Responding to parking violations Responding to broken streetlights 0
2
4
6
8
10
Note: All figures are taken from The Model Police Officer: Recruitment, Training, and Community Engagement, ICMA, 2018.
highest by managers/CAOs (9.92), followed by human resources (9.81) and police chiefs (9.67), with community respondents rating it lowest, at a still considerable 9.31. The ratings may be reflective of the importance of the issues themselves or of the perception they are or are not policing matters. While broken streetlights may contribute to crime, for example, some in the community may perceive that
to be more a matter for public works or utilities staff response rather than police involvement. There is, in fact, a differential among respondents to that question, with police staff rating it slightly more important than community members (4.35 vs. 3.93), but both rated it considerably lower than other issues. A wider disparity can be seen on foot patrols, where the average rating was 6.86. Understandably, those in areas
with low population density rated this of lesser importance (5.55), as it might be impractical to use foot patrols in sprawling or rural areas. This same issue was also the one with the highest differential above the mean—an importance rating of 8.37 from respondents in communities where 30 percent or more of the population is African American. This may reflect a greater desire for one-on-one
Figure 2. Preferred Education and Experience, by Position (Asked of All Staff and Community Respondents). Education: At least a high school diploma/GED Education: At least some college Education: Bachelor's degree Education: Associate's degree Prior police experience Education: Master's degree Prior social work or psychology experience or education Prior military experience 0 LOWEST PRIORITY
1
2
3
Executives
4
5
6
7
Mid-management
8
Officers
9
10 HIGHEST PRIORITY
relationship building between police officers and members of minority communities. Responding to accidents was rated as more important in jurisdictions with low population density, while crime reduction was a higher priority in areas of higher population density. An activity receiving a lower rating by community members2 might suggest that police departments need to communicate more effectively why some tasks are important. Also, where there is consensus that some aspects of policing—like building community trust—are a higher priority, those might be considered more formally in the structure of a recruitment process and in the evaluation of recruits. Preferred Education, Experience, and Skills
Respondents were asked about the importance of various skills, education, and experience (Figures 2 and 3) that may be found among successful police officers and those in executive management (chiefs, assistant chiefs, captains) and middle management (lieutenants, sergeants). The highest priority is at least a high school diploma or GED; the lowest is prior military experience. While members of the military are often recruited into policing, such experience was not deemed a prerequisite. Beyond that, there is an apparent hierarchy regarding additional education, with most perceiving it to be more important for managers than for officers. While the importance of a police chief having language skills beyond English was rated an average of 5.32, in communities where 30 percent or more of the population is Hispanic, it received an average rating of 6.37. As shown in Figure 3, language »
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skills were deemed more important for officers (5.87) than for police administration. In none of these cases was
Recruiting Strategies
there a significant difference in ratings based on the population size of the jurisdictions reporting.
All respondents were asked to identify what they felt were the most effective recruiting
Figure 3. Preferred Personal and Technical Skills, by Position (Asked of All Staff and Community Respondents). Strategic thinking Relationships with community leaders Financial management Effective supervision Critical thinking Analytical/statistical abilities Physical agility Knowledge of community history Information technology skills Social media proficiency Language skills (other than English) 0
1
2
3
4
Executives
5
6
Mid-management
7
8
9
10
Officers
Figure 4. Most Effective Recruiting Strategies (Responses from Jurisdiction Staff Only). Not sure
30%
Relationship recruiting/word of mouth
12%
College students
10%
Social media Recruiting from other police departments facing fiscal challenges Community events
10% 8% 6%
Website; Online advertising
6%
Competitive pay
6%
Community involvement
6%
Minority recruiting
6%
Recruiting those from the military
5%
Command staff engaging directly with recruits
5%
Explorers, interns, community service officers
5%
Schools
5%
Advertising
4%
Due dilligence, background checks, and personality profiles
3%
Information sharing on application and testing process
3%
Ride-alongs, boot camp, "run with a recruiter"
3%
Recruiting at Academy
3%
Competitive benefits package
3%
None Billboards, banners Focus on postive traits of successful officers (e.g., communication, empathy, conflict resolution) Outreach to female applicants
3% 2% 2% 2%
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strategies. Understandably, a high percentage of community respondents who do not deal with the procedural side of recruiting indicated that they were not sure or left the question blank (66 percent). That group aside, the remainder indicated the importance of community involvement (7 percent), outreach in the schools (6 percent), or college and minority community recruiting (5 percent each). Looking exclusively at the respondents within each organization (police, human relations, manager/chief administrative officer, or other staff; see Figure 4), 30 percent expressed no opinion; 3 percent said there were no effective recruitment strategies; and 12 percent identified relationship recruiting (based on prior encounters with the candidates within the community) and word of mouth as the most effective method. Given this finding, community policing could reap benefits for a department not just in better policecommunity relations, but also in building the relationships that could help identify potential future officers or make a career in police work more attractive to them. Social media and online recruiting were also highly rated, at 10 and 6 percent, respectively. This is not an unexpected finding, given that public safety recruits represent a younger demographic than the workforce as a whole and may be more likely to engage electronically. Percentages in Figure 4 reflect responses from jurisdiction staff only.3 This was an open-response question, with many people indicating more
than one strategy. As a result, the percentages shown sum to more than 100 percent of respondents. Perhaps the most sensitive strategy cited is recruiting officers from other communities, specifically those experiencing fiscal stress (8 percent). This may be an indication that the jurisdictions themselves have pursued this strategy or that they perceive that others have done so, recruiting away those they’d already gone to great lengths to recruit and train. One could argue that even absent any active attempts to “poach” these officers, a certain passive appeal would remain for some officers to work their way up the ladder to their perceived ideal department. The practicality of such moves might depend in part on the structure of retirement systems, including vesting requirements and the portability of service credit to other departments within the state. Another strategy cited by 5 percent of respondents was for command staff to be directly involved in the recruiting process. This may mean the chief, captains, or other high-level leadership
A preference for bilingual skills among police officers received a rating of
meeting with participants in academy or explorer programs, attending job fairs or other outreach efforts, or meeting one-on-one with new officers during orientation. Targeted Recruiting Focusing just on human resources staff, the survey also asked directly about targeted recruitment efforts (Figure 5), including what audiences were targeted and what images and themes were used in the campaign(s). The top responses include social media and outreach to women, minorities, military, and universities. As with the question asked of all respondents, there were also sizable shares indicating the use of non-English language media (21 percent) or marketing within other metropolitan areas (14 percent). Among human resource respondents, 64 percent indicated that they are doing targeted outreach to female recruits. In the question about the most effective outreach strategy, such outreach was cited by 2 percent of total respondents and by 6 percent of human resources respondents.
5.87 out of 10—higher than the rating for completion of a bachelor’s degree (4.53).
To put this into perspective, when asked about the most effective strategy, 30 percent were not sure. Also, when presented with an openresponse question to cite the most effective strategies, many will cite one or two approaches that leap to mind and may leave out others that have been moderately effective. The determination of the effectiveness of each strategy on its own would require a more in-depth survey or a post-recruitment follow-up by each jurisdiction to ask their successful applicants what outreach methods were most appealing to them. Regardless of the outreach efforts being made to bring more women onto the force, most respondents indicated that the share of female recruits hired over the past
State and Local Government Workforce: 2018 Data and 10-Year Trends, Center for State and Local Government Excellence, 2018. 2 Staff and community responses are reported side-by-side in various figures within the full report. 3 Additional detail is available in the full report, Figure 5. 1
Figure 5: Targeted Recruiting (Responses From Human Resources Staff Only). Social media
79%
Specific outreach to women
64%
Specific outreach to minority communities
57%
Public service announcements: Print media
57%
Military career/retirement offices
57%
Universities
57%
Community colleges
43%
Non-English language media
Gerald Young is senior research associate, ICMA and SLGE, based in Granville, Ohio (gyoung@icma.org).
21% 21%
High schools Marketing within other metropolitan areas
14%
Billboards
14%
Public service announcements: Broadcast media
14 %
0%
three years was between 9 and 22 percent, so one could argue there is still plenty of room to improve upon that level of performance. Minority recruitment figures were also collected as part of this study and should be considered in the context of each community’s demographics. As you are conducting your own police recruitments, you might consider how the priorities, skills, and methods studied here relate to your own organization’s goals. The full report goes in to considerably more detail on demographics, departmental training priorities, hiring preferences, minimum requirements, and the relationship between the departments and their wider communities, via engagement efforts, trust, recruitment, and departmental oversight. ICMA members can download a copy of the full report from http://ow.ly/2TqI30mS751.
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
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COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
CLIENT Robert Mathias, Development Manager for the City of Maricopa GEOGRAPHY City of Maricopa, Arizona CHALLENGES Their mission to be paperless required an easier permit process and faster turnaround to attract more businesses looking to expand or develop in Maricopa. R E S U LT S Using Dude Solutions’ SmartGov™ as their partner in permitting services, they’ve made permitting transparent, efficient and painless for both staff and customers. FAST STATS Permits now issued 50 to 70 percent faster; Plan reviews completed 30 to 50 percent more rapidly; Walk-in customers have been reduced by 95 percent
City of Maricopa Eliminates Paper and Gains Efficiency Maricopa set an aggressive goal: Be the most transparent city in the world. For Maricopa Development Services, this meant eliminating paper plans, streamlining processes and issuing permits more quickly. Yes, eliminating paper completely. For some local governments still relying heavily on paper processes, it could seem like a strange idea, but Maricopa had the foresight to see how this seemingly simple change could lead to a huge transformation in the way they could operate. What was their reasoning for going paperless? › Sustainability. Adopting a means of electronic filing over paper usage meant less waste and carbon emissions. › Better customer service. Customers could submit plans from anywhere and have the ability to pay online. Plus, with a transparent permitting system, customers could track their permit status from anywhere, resulting in more straightforward communication. › Reduction in front office traffic. With customers now able to do so much online, office visits would be reduced, saving both staff and customers time. With that motivation, they set out to find a tool that offered electronic filing while providing better efficiency and organization for them and those they served. Maricopa ultimately chose SmartGov™, a robust community development solution, because it met their important requirements: › › › › › › ›
Improve permit wait times Enable electronic plan reviews Make online permits easier to reduce office traffic Facilitate clearer communication with customers Increase time savings for staff so they could accomplish more Reduce paper use and environmental impact Be cloud-based, requiring no server maintenance
With Robert Mathias, Development Manager for the City of Maricopa, leading the way, they finished implementation and went live with the solution July of 2015, and by January 2016, they were officially paperless. But it wasn’t just Robert’s immediate office reducing paper usage – the effort spread throughout the entire city’s government offices. Everything is now required to go through an electronic process, which Robert was careful to set up for success from the start. He trained his staff before
1
dudesolutions.com
CLIENT SUCCESS STORY City of Maricopa
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
“Our goal is to be the most transparent city in the world. SmartGov is a huge step toward that goal.”
Business Wins › Olive Garden®: When Maricopa was able to pass permits in so little time that the builder was able to turn the project around in four months instead of eight, the restaurant generated $4 million in those four months that they wouldn’t have otherwise seen. › Walmart®: When the chain wanted to open a location in Maricopa, they expected to follow their usual procedure of sending a group of personnel to make decisions onsite – resulting in expenses for hotel space, rental cars and more. But with Maricopa’s processes done efficiently online, no one needed to travel to do business in person, saving $22,000. › Denny’s®: The developer of this project found Maricopa’s processes to be so solid and successful, his praise made news.
implementing the solution and purchased tablets and thermal printers for employees to use in their vehicles, enabling them to work and print wherever the job took them. He also got rid of his email and phone line to encourage citizens to use the portal. He knew once everyone got over the hump of change, they would see what a benefit it was for everyone involved. And they certainly have seen the benefit. Going paperless has changed the game for Maricopa. Regarding permits alone, that process has now been reduced from 100 days to just two, and that dramatic time cut has proven to be instrumental economically. In fact, it’s helped be the deciding factor for businesses looking to build in Maricopa. Where it might take six months to get a business up and running in another city, Maricopa’s streamlined processes can get the doors open in just a couple months, meaning quicker revenue for business owners. And yes, everything is paperless now. So much so that Robert challenges people to find a way they use paper. “We are 100 percent paperless in all areas of development, building, planning, engineering, fire, police, business licensing, code enforcement, etc. We have reduced our walk-in customers by 95 percent, and we are issuing single-family house permits in under an hour. My goal is to issue permits before they are even applied for,” Roberts says. Going paperless shouldn’t cause worry for citizens, though – if they’re not comfortable submitting online, they can still bring their paper documents into the office, and Maricopa personnel will scan them into the system and print it back out for them. So while citizens can use paper if they require it, Maricopa still holds their operations to a firm paperless system. What Robert and his team have done has not only created a more sustainable, environmentally sound way of working for generations to come, but improved service and efficiency for their entire community. “This really reduced our plan review times,” said Development Services Director Martin Scribner. “And it helps make the City of Maricopa a great place to build and do business.” Their customers have also noticed. “I’ve been a construction manager in Maricopa for about four years with LGI Homes. I remember the old file card permits that got pulled for inspections every day,” said Senior Construction Manager Darren Roggeman. “SmartGov has been an incredible tool and upgrade for us in the field. Not only can we get immediate inspection results, but we have the ability to go online and see or print any inspection corrections. SmartGov also allows us to schedule inspections from our desktop or tablets, and we can see when permits are ready to pick up. These are huge time savers that directly translate into dollars.” In just three years since they went live, it’s safe to say the City of Maricopa has met its goal and then some. “Our goal is to be the most transparent city in the world,” says Robert. “SmartGov is a huge step toward that goal.”
L E A R N M O R E : dudesolutions.com
The
ACCESSIBLE
WEBSITE Creating Content Responsive to Residents with a Disability
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BY MARTIN LIND
As
a local government leader, you have a responsibility to follow the laws and to help your staff do so. Since the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, all federal civil rights laws pertaining to people with disabilities became part of the legal portfolio that local governments must track. Title II of the law “prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in all services, programs, and activities provided to the public by state and local governments.”1 Unless you want to claim that a website is not a service, program, or activity of your organization, your website must be made accessible to people with disabilities. How can you motivate your organization to make its website accessible? Most point to the moral and legal reasons to do it, and both are extremely good reasons to update a site. There is, however, another more effective and selfish reason to do it: It will benefit your organization. Motivation for Change
WebAIM, the United States’ leading authority on web accessibility, posted a blog by Jared Smith discussing the hierarchy for motivating accessibility change.2 He explains that guilting your website content managers into updating content is not a good motivator for change because this doesn’t last.
Instead, he proposed a hierarchy of motivation to inspire people to create accessible content, based in part on seeing the transformational impact it can have on people’s lives (see Figure 1 on pg. 26). Ask a resident with a vision disability who uses software that reads aloud every word on a website (i.e., a screen reader) to come in and demonstrate how it’s used. It’s a great way to inspire content editors to keep accessibility in mind and much more effective than showing your team a YouTube video of it. Witnessing the importance of an accessible website in person can be difficult to do. How would you find someone to come in and do the demonstration? Can this person return every time someone in your organization is deemed a content editor and needs inspiration to create accessible web pages? However critical it is to inspire your staff to do the right thing, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to have someone like this at your beck and call. You will instead need to find another motivating reason to always keep accessibility in mind. Legal Threshold for Noncompliance
Since the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, having a website that’s inaccessible to people with disabilities is a civil rights violation and could lead to an investigation by—and settlement with—the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The truth is, few local governments have been drawn into a settlement with DOJ for having a noncompliant website. In fact, by most accounts, there are few that have been investigated at all. University of Minnesota3 and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)4 (the standard bearer of accessibility standards) list no more »
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Inspire Enlighten Effectiveness
Reward Require Punish Guilt
Figure 1. WebAIM’s Hierarchy for
Motivating Accessibility Change
than 20 local government agencies settling through 2016, and an Internet search doesn’t provide many more since then, with the city and county of Denver5 having the highest profile. In Denver’s case—as is the situation for many agencies— DOJ was investigating physical issues like curb access for wheelchairs and looked into virtual accessibility issues, including 9-1-1 services and websites, as part of its research. There are roughly 30,000 local governments6 in the United States. If only 50 percent of them had websites, that would be 15,000 local government websites. If we round up the 20 agencies that settled with the DOJ to 100 to account for those that didn’t make the news, that’s still about 0.5 percent. To put that in perspective, the odds of a local government website being subject to a DOJ settlement is about twice as likely as the risk of dying from a global asteroid impact7 that causes a mass extinction. That doesn’t mean your organization shouldn’t do everything it can to follow the law; it simply means that trying to motivate your website content creators to follow the law out of fear of getting “caught” does not hold up.
Convincing Arguments
If guilting agency staff into making an accessible website doesn’t work and doing it as insurance against a DOJ settlement is a statistical nonstarter, how do we convince local government staff to create accessible content? Simple: It benefits their organization as well as website visitors. Improve your website’s reach.
The undeniable truth is that many of your community’s
work with that browser because it would exclude 7 percent of potential website visitors. By creating web pages that are accessible and therefore compatible with assistive technologies, you are increasing your audience by about as many people as use Internet Explorer to view your site. Serve your customers where they want to be served. A
recent study by Granicus (http://bit.ly/2KVBiOq) shows that nearly 50 percent of local government web traffic is coming from a mobile phone. Half of your customers clearly want a website to respond to their devices, so they don’t need to pinch and push the screen to navigate through your website. The good news is that making your site responsive is a key component of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the standard that your website is being held to.11
it’s not likely to be optimally indexed by Google.” When you look at it that way, following accessibility leading practices will likely lead to your pages turning up higher in search results. Considering that about a third of all search result clicks12 are on the first result and nearly 100 percent of clicks are on the first page, anything you can do to move up the page will improve your website presence and traffic. My suggestions here will focus on Google because it has more market share in the United States13 than all other search engines combined: • Upload transcripts of meeting videos. Many agencies
put videos of official meetings on YouTube and rely on the automatic closed captioning to make them accessible to people with a hearing disability instead of uploading a transcript. YouTube’s automatic closed
The undeniable truth is that many of your community’s residents and customers have a disability that requires an assistive technology like a screen reader that relies on a properly formatted website. residents and customers have a disability that requires an assistive technology like a screen reader that relies on a properly formatted website. Data on the number of Americans who use web assistive technology is lacking, but some 3 percent of Americans are legally blind8 and must use a screen reader to access the web and 8 percent of adults 55 to 64 years old have disabling hearing loss and require accurate closed captions to watch videos.9 To put this in perspective, Internet Explorer has less than 7 percent of the market.10 Yet it’s unlikely that you’d procure a new software system that didn’t
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While responsive design is a part of the version 2.1 standards and government agencies are only held to version 2.0, you can give everyone what they want, regardless of whether they use assistive technology to access your site, by being mobile-friendly and also staying ahead of the curve on accessibility standards. Make search engines happy.
Something stuck with me during my accessibility training at WebAIM. Instructor Jared Smith said something to the effect of “Google’s crawler can’t see or hear, so if your content isn’t formatted to be accessible,
captioning, however, is not very accurate.14 Google will crawl the transcript you upload with your video, looking for content to add to its search results. A study found that transcripts will also benefit you: views increase by 13.5 percent in the first two weeks after adding a transcript.15 If you’re putting videos on the web to be seen, a 13.5 percent increase is a big benefit for most government agencies. • Use more descriptive text on links and add descriptive text to images. By now, you
should know that, in general,
Captions allow you to showcase your videos without having to turn up the volume on the television. If your source is on your public access channel, you’ll need to add a closedcaptioned transcript. If you’re using a YouTube stream, you’ll need to edit the automated captions to ensure no one sees any embarrassing errors. Social media. Sharing your
using “click here” or “see more” as the text on a link are generally compliant16 with WCAG standards, but not accessible.17 Adding more descriptive language in the link benefits your agency as well as improves accessibility. That’s because Google will rank it higher18 when it crawls your site because it provides additional context over a generic “click here.” Similarly, adding descriptive text to images (i.e., “alt text” or “alt tags”) when you upload an image gives Google’s crawler context about that image. Putting an alt text of “Mayor Mary Jones” on the photo of Mayor Jones will add data and relevance about the image, improving the search result of your photo for those who are looking for the Mayor. • Properly structure your headers. This is a basic
practice of web accessibility because it provides context for sections of the page. Separating your page’s content by creating headings that are larger, bold, or a different color are not substitutes for proper formatting. Instead, use your website’s content management system header functionality to
format the text that you use to break up your content. By some accounts, this practice gives Google’s crawler a better sense of what content is on the page,19 further improving its rank in the search results. If “apply for a permit” is in a header, Google’s crawler believes that it is a more relevant result for people looking for a permit compared to when that same text is simply in the text on the page but bold and a larger font. Other Benefits of Captioning Videos
Increasing search results in Google is a great way to motivate your website editors to follow accessibility guidelines. Unlike words on a page, making your videos accessible with accurate captions has an added benefit of increasing your reach. Here are examples: Televisions in public areas.
Some local governments put a television in the lobby of a public building or the waiting room of a department. Showing your meeting videos is a great way to entertain and educate waiting customers, but the facility often can be noisy.
agency’s videos on social media is also a great way to build an audience because you can leverage the networks of your viewers. Captioning videos accurately allows your social media followers to watch the video without volume, a factor critical to those who don’t want to have everyone around them know what they’re watching. Teaching through video.
Research demonstrates20 that something read and heard is retained better than if it’s just read. Adding captions to videos that you want people to remember, like “stop, drop, and roll” fire safety videos, will increase a viewer’s likelihood of remembering the information. Local government leaders know that they must do the right thing on web accessibility to be legally compliant and want to motivate their staff to do so. Website editors shouldn’t need a reason other than “Because I asked you to” and “It’s the law.” If that doesn’t work and “It’s the right thing to do” doesn’t either, focus on their selfinterest by saying “It’ll make your pages better and more widely viewed.” Content creators and people who update websites ultimately want their words and media to
be read, understood, and appreciated by the widest possible audience. Endnotes and Resources 1 https://www.ada.gov/ada_title_II.htm 2 https://webaim.org/blog/motivatingaccessibility-change 3 http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/ wcagwg/settlements/aa.html 4 https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/ wiki/Legal_Settlement_Agreements_that_Reference_WCAG 5 https://www.justice.gov/opa/pressrelease/file/1022691/download 6 https://www.statista.com/ statistics/544400/market-share-ofinternet-browsers-desktop 7 http://www.tulane.edu/~sanelson/ Natural_Disasters/impacts.htm 8 https://nfb.org/blindness-statistics 9 https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/ statistics/quick-statistics-hearing 10 https://www.statista.com/ statistics/544400/market-share-ofinternet-browsers-desktop 11 https://webaim.org/standards/wcag/ WCAG2Checklist.pdf 12 https://www.smartinsights.com/ search-engine-optimisation-seo/ seo-analytics/comparison-of-googleclickthrough-rates-by-position 13 https://www.statista.com/ statistics/267161/market-share-ofsearch-engines-in-the-united-state 14 https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=SrApzuyirvs 15 https://www.3playmedia.com/ customers/case-studies/discoverydigital-networks 16 https://www.w3.org/TR/ UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/ navigation-mechanisms-refs.html 17 https://webaim.org/techniques/ hypertext 18 https://support.google.com/ webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en 19 https://www.postmm.com/seo/ technical-seo/h1-and-h2-header-tagsand-how-they-affect-seo 20 https://www.psychologytoday.com/ us/blog/ulterior-motives/201005/sayit-loud-i-m-creating-distinctive-memory
Martin Lind is vice president of services and business development, Granicus, El Segundo, California (martin.lind@granicus.com). Granicus is an ICMA Strategic Partner.
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SURVIVING A
Deadly
Wildfire Recovery Insights from Santa Rosa’s Manager
BY ELLEN FOREMAN
To get a sense of the nightmare that was the Santa Rosa, California, wildfire in October 2017, part of the Northern California firestorm, all you need to do is go to YouTube. There is bodycam footage of police, firefighters, and most impressively, bus drivers who heroically transported at-risk residents out of neighborhoods that were being engulfed by flames.
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A
rguably, nothing could have been done to prepare the city for the speed at which the fire, fueled by hurricane force winds, jumped across a freeway that would normally have served as a strong fire barrier. “With the fire moving at that speed, there was not much time to get the word out,” said Santa Rosa City Manager Sean McGlynn. “So, in addition to the emergency communications being done by the city and Sonoma County,” McGlynn said, “neighbors went door to door, helping each other evacuate.” Countywide, the fire claimed 24 lives, and in Santa Rosa, 5 percent of the housing stock—more than 3,000 homes—were lost, explained McGlynn. City employees at all levels became first responders, with some of the 62 employees who lost their homes serving in the emergency operations center, evacuation shelters, out in the field, or within other city facilities critical to the emergency response. “What I’m most proud of is the speed at which the recovery process began,” McGlynn said. “Once workers had stabilized the fire-impacted areas, volunteers, in addition to staff, helped keep these areas secure and private, giving residents time to grieve on their properties.” Just 12 days after the fires began, and with areas still under evacuation, the city partnered with Sonoma County and launched a joint website resource for fire survivors. It contained news, updates, and answers to frequently asked questions on recovery, mental health resources, housing resources, debris removal/fire cleanup information, upcoming recovery meetings, and more. The city credits mutual-aid staffers from the city of San Rafael with helping to get the framework of the site put together. The site can be viewed at www.SonomaCounty Recovers.org. Rebuilding Portal
McGlynn said helping home and business owners rebuild was a priority for staff early on. Creating an online portal that was focused solely on rebuilding information and permitting needs was as necessary to develop as it was to create a separate, physical permit center for fire survivors. Adriane Mertens, Santa Rosa communications and intergovernmental relations officer, explained: “The site plugs in information from other departments beyond the planning department to make sure we put rebuilding information all in one place for fire survivors.” The site features an online rebuilding data tracker with up-to-the-minute updates on such rebuilding permit data as how many homes are under construction, have completed rebuilding, and are in the permitting process. “There are also recovery map and parcel report search links that allow people to access specific information about an individual property, including setbacks and utility site information; if a rebuild is planning to make major or minor changes to their home rebuild design; what permits have been applied for; and where a property is in a particular stage of rebuilding,” she added (see www.Srcity.org/rebuild). Just over a year after the disaster, 51 homes have been completed and 700 are under construction. The building permits for another 540 properties have been submitted and are going through the review process or have been approved, and their home construction is pending. McGlynn said that one of the biggest questions his team wrestles with though is what about the 1,600 residents who still have not started the rebuilding process? He pointed out that there are many reasons behind the numbers, including underinsured homes because the cost to build in the San Francisco Bay Area has escalated precipitously. People are also still deciding whether to rebuild or move on. And it’s the start of the rainy season, which is causing a slowdown, and some of the homes had multiple families under one roof. » J A N U A RY/ F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 9 | P U B L I C M A N A G E M E N T | 29
NAVIGATING THE AFTERMATH OF A DISASTER Santa Rosa City Manager Sean McGlynn provided these three lessons learned from the disaster and ongoing recovery experience.
McGlynn explained that this last factor alone is a challenge when trying to assess the scope of the damage. “FEMA looks at every roof as a single-family residence and that’s not realistic. It may be how is it defined on a state and federal level, but what does that really mean in your community? It impacts how much resource becomes available to you to address the needs of the community.” The city is working with the nonprofit community to get a better sense of what’s happening to people who might fall outside the traditional support definition, he added.
in of new soil for properties degrades the roads. “It would be great if all parties could agree to assess that and say this is the value that the impact of taking out fire debris had on your community’s roadways and thus, we are going to give you a check to cover that,” McGlynn said. It would not only benefit his community but all communities experiencing these kinds of disasters.
Preparing for What Is Expected
In looking back over the past year at the time this was written, McGlynn said he hopes that people will say the staff did the best job they could possibly do. “One of the challenges is recognizing what we did but understanding that there is so much more work in front of us as it relates to recovery. We’re making progress, but recovery is a marathon not a sprint,” he said. McGlynn learned to “have faith that folks, if they are given the space to figure things out, will. We weren’t flawless, but we owned our mistakes and we were trying to figure out how to do the best by our community.” He added that the help his fellow management colleagues gave him has led him to try a pay-it-forward scheme. “I’ve offered to help other managers by being a sounding board, and my council has been gracious enough to allow me to do that.”
McGlynn said his city is working in partnership with the state and the region to prepare for an uncertain future, given the number of natural disasters plaguing local governments in recent years. “We are working with our state to reposition resources to assist in high-risk events. As a region, for example, we’re looking at vegetation management, something that doesn’t help much to do exclusively as a municipality. We need to work across counties and across local jurisdictions to make sure we have a strong vegetation management plan to push down fuel loads and mitigate risks where we can.” McGlynn said that in addition to the state and region, Santa Rosa leaders have been working to “get our federal partners to look at fires in a slightly different way. Especially as they threaten these urban areas because again, it costs all of us when you have to take federal tax dollars to do this type of debrisremoval-and-rebuild mission.” One of his objectives is to try to get some of the new circumstances Santa Rosa encountered into the FEMA playbook. How, for example, the removal of roughly 1 million tons of fire debris and the subsequent hauling
A Marathon, Not a Sprint
Ellen Foreman is director, Outreach, Brand Management, and Marketing, ICMA, Washington, D.C. (eforeman@icma.org).
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• Trust and verify. Always assume that people who are there to help are trying to do the right thing. They’re faced with circumstances, whether it’s a manual that tells them “this is how you do it” or contracts that they have with third-party entities that bind them to certain criteria. The manager’s job is to understand what those circumstances are as much as possible, and he or she might have to lean in and ask questions and push people to rethink some things. • Take assistance where you can get it. McGlynn relied on several of his colleagues. Malibu City Manager Reva Feldman assisted about a week into the fires to help on the leadership side and provided much needed relief in terms of staff resources and additional brain power. Henry Gardner, who was the former city manager in Oakland, was manager during the Oakland Hills fire in 1991. His advice and counsel for McGlynn and team were invaluable. A manager might not be ready but should take down names of individuals who he or she can call and then figure out when and how to use their support. • Keep people at the center. The emergency management process sometimes tries to wear out a person, and a manager needs to find the reservoir to always think about what is happening to community members. McGlynn advises to think about what decisions you would want people to make on your behalf if in the same situation. And it may not be easy, but circumstances might require that you go the extra mile—asking additional questions and pushing back on a partner about the decisions they are making and how it impacts the community.
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Catching Up with Local Government Management Fellows
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
By Tanisha Briley
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O
Nathan Thiel, ICMA-CM ne of the coolest ICMA programs you have likely never heard of helped define this author’s career. The
Local Government Management Fellowship (LGMF) began in 2004, and I was part of the 2006 cohort. I was attracted to the Fellowship (icma.org/ lgmf) because of its explicit focus on mentoring and career development support from a local government manager. Because of that mentoring and support I received from a city manager when I was a Fellow, and subsequently a budget manager and assistant manager, in Davenport, Iowa, I have the tools and experience to successfully support my community today. After nearly 14 years, LGMF has benefited graduates with groundbreaking career-entry experiences, generating 270 alumni, more than 20 of whom have risen to chief administrative officer roles. And now several alumni are hosting their own Fellows, continuing the cycle of mentorship. This article features some of the LGMF alumni in “where are they now” profiles. You can find additional profiles online at icma.org/fellowstoday. More than anything else, I urge my management colleagues to consider hosting a Fellow in their community. Not only will you gain more than you give, but your impact will extend beyond your community to places where Fellows will serve as local government leaders in the future. Here are the stories of seven Fellows who, like me, have gained so much from LGMF.
Village Administrator, Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin LGMF cohort: 2007; Riverside, Illinois
After receiving my M.P.A. degree from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, I landed in the village of Riverside, Illinois, as my LGMF host community. There, I served two years as the assistant to the public works director and as the interim public works director. Since then, I have served as a budget analyst in Sugar Land, Texas; city administrator in Mauston, Wisconsin, and currently village administrator in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. LGMF was a catalyst and gave me confidence to aim toward becoming a local government manager. I have had the benefit of working in small and large communities and in rural and metro governments. I have learned that a community’s size can play a significant role in the direct impact your efforts have in a community. Fellows should take advantage of the opportunities afforded them and shouldn’t be afraid to experience a market they might otherwise overlook. Chances are the position that looks less than ideal will afford more opportunities to make a direct and real impact than a person’s “dream job.” As Fellows advance in their careers, I can assure them that new and exciting opportunities will come their way. Jacqueline Guzman
Deputy City Manager, Cupertino, California LGMF cohort: 2009; San Jose, California
I started my Fellowship with the city of San Jose, California, in 2009 and stayed on in the budget office for a few years before receiving a promotion. I joined Cupertino as a senior management analyst in 2012 and worked my way up—and sideways—to my current role as deputy city manager (DCM). As DCM, I oversee public affairs and sustainability and manage the city manager’s office, including citywide policy and legislative affairs. I’m also on hand to help the council or departments with any type of priority project. LGMF helped me understand the responsibility that comes with the profession and gave me a citywide perspective. It was also great to have a group of friends with whom to compare notes. I advise Fellows to take advantage of the special access to leaders in an organization by being a part of LGMF. Take risks and raise your hand for special assignments that expand your skills and your portfolio. Lastly, LGMF will help you find a champion in the organization who can open doors and provide you with opportunities. »
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Sarah Alig
Assistant to the City Administrator, Woodbury, Minnesota LGMF cohort: 2014; Olathe, Kansas
Since June 2015, I have served the city of Woodbury, Minnesota, as assistant to the city administrator. Before moving to Minnesota for this position, I served in Olathe, Kansas, as its Fellow in the city manager’s office and the budget office. I was staff liaison to the Olathe Teen Council, organized a “Fresh Air” employee development forum, developed a crisis communications plan and a “Communities That Care” grant application, and presented the city manager’s office year-end report to the city council. These experiences exposed me to a wide variety of operations in a large, innovative, and well-run suburb and reinforced my dedication to public service. Based on my experience, I would recommend that anyone serving as a Fellow maximize that special opportunity to: 1. Ask questions. Nobody expects you to know more than you do, and this is a great chance to demonstrate humility and curiosity. Pay attention to the context. Sometimes it’s helpful to ask questions right away in a meeting, but sometimes it’s better to pull someone aside afterward and say, “Hey, can you explain what happened in there?” 2. Build relationships. Shadow people, ask questions, invite them to get coffee with you, and ask if you can tag along and sit in on meetings. If you happen to be bored (not often I might add), go around to different people, ask them what they’re working on, and see how you can help them. 34 | P U B L I C M A N A G E M E N T | J A N U A RY/ F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 9
3. Make yourself useful. Volunteer for all the research, investigation, or busy-work things that come up in the meetings you’re sitting in on. Earn a reputation for being helpful, prompt, curious, and resourceful.
Haley Kadish
Performance and Innovation Officer, Albuquerque, New Mexico LGMF cohort: 2012–2013; Catawba County, North Carolina
After completing my M.P.A. degree at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University, I was an LGMF in Catawba County, North Carolina. I went on from my Fellowship to help improve nearly 50 local government organizations with The Novak Consulting Group. In June 2018, I started a new role as the performance and innovation officer for Albuquerque, New Mexico. LGMF was an invaluable experience for me, primarily because it was instrumental in shaping my way of thinking. It taught me to think at the level of a local government leader—a mighty feat for someone straight out of graduate school. If I could give one piece of advice to people who are just starting out in local government, it would be that a positive attitude goes a long way. In my experience, energy and enthusiasm for the work is contagious, so bring it with you and share it every single day.
Steven Buter
Budget and Management Analyst, Greensboro, North Carolina LGMF cohort: 2008; University Place, Washington
After finishing my M.P.A. degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008, I packed up and moved all the way across the country to start my Fellowship with the city of University Place, Washington. After five years in University Place doing everything from dressing up as McGruff the Crime Dog to managing an economic development strategic plan update, my wife, young son, and I moved back across the country. We settled in the Triad area of North Carolina, where I took an analyst position in the budget and evaluation department of the city of Greensboro and my wife continued her career with the Department of Veterans Affairs in nearby Winston-Salem. Beginning my career in University Place, a small/ midsize city with a small staff, exposed me to every aspect of local government. I worked with community leaders, local businesses, intergovernmental teams, and elected and appointed officials. Working with a small team, some of whom are still trusted mentors, taught me what a high-performing team can achieve when it works together. LGMF opened the door to local government management for me, and I would encourage others to take risks and embrace new opportunities early in their careers while their personal situations are likely to be flexible. Kevin Catlin
City Manager, Springfield, Michigan LGMF cohort: 2015; Tulsa, Oklahoma
I graduated from the University of Illinois at Springfield and started my local government career in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as a Fellow. I transitioned to Brookings, South Dakota, where I served as assistant city manager for nearly two and a half years. I was appointed city manager of Springfield, Michigan, in May 2018. LGMF prepared me for my current position in many ways. My mentor had the most significant impact on me as it pertains to ethics and professional development. I truly valued his advice, perception, and opinions. Current Fellows should diversify their experiences (outside of their comfort zone) even if they are assigned a specific department or project. Local government management professionals must have a well-rounded view of government. Prospective applicants should highlight their broad experience in working with people and executing projects that have made a significant impact on their community.
Genesis Gavino
Assistant to the City Manager and Chief of Staff, Dallas, Texas LGMF cohort: 2014–2015; Tacoma, Washington
In February 2014, I started my Fellowship with the city manager’s office in Tacoma, Washington, prior to graduating from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington. LGMF was invaluable to my experience in Tacoma because it provided me with a support system of peers whom I could reach out to and learn from. My one piece of advice for Fellows is that there’s no such thing as a bad project or assignment. Don’t limit yourself because it doesn’t fit your “path”; view everything as an opportunity to learn and grow, especially at such an early stage of your career. My mentors instilled this mindset in me from the beginning, and today I’m proud to serve as the assistant to the city manager in Dallas, Texas, the ninth largest city and third largest councilmanager city in the country. I’m excited about what lies ahead and look forward to the future leaders developed through LGMF and ICMA. Tanisha Briley is city manager, Cleveland Heights, Ohio (citymanager@clvhts.com). For more information on the 2019 LGMF or to host a Fellow in your community and help start a new career, visit icma.org/lgmf or contact lgmfprogram@icma.org.
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TECHNOLOGY
Civic Engagement Means More Than Gathering Data Why Listening to Residents and Building Ownership Are Critical Technology has disrupted many business
Gal Alon, Ph.D., is chief executive officer and founder of www.Insights.US, which enhances civic engagement with the power of artificial intelligence (gal@Insights.US).
traditions. We do not have paper calendars to schedule meetings anymore, nor do we use overhead projectors to show handwritten slides or paper maps to navigate our way. It’s time to ask how technology can reshape the traditions of our communities. Sensors and algorithms can clearly make them more effective in managing traffic, reducing crime, and improving services. But what about civic engagement? Can it be replaced with sensors tracking our satisfaction? To answer this question, we should ask what civic engagement is supposed to achieve. The answer is twofold: It should help local government executives make effective decisions, and it should build a public consensus to deliver them. Both can be transformed by technology but can hardly be replaced by sensors. Let’s break this down. Making Effective Decisions
Local governments are in a constant battle to offer better value for their residents. Is it possible that in 20 years we will have an algorithm that manages local resources based
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By Gal Alon
on data? Can we expect a modern “SimCity” simulator to auto-generate a budget and a plan? The answer is no. Indeed, the growing competition between communities requires managers to collect as much data as possible. While technology can help them collect the data, only residents can help find solutions that can fit into the local context. Dashboards cannot replace wisdom. Let’s look at an example. Insights.US helped a city faced with growing dissatisfaction in a major neighborhood. Millions of dollars were invested in renewing the area, based on the data, but it took one open question to find out that there were no street lights during nighttime. Female residents were terrified to walk there. If the city hadn’t asked residents about what needed to change, the problem might never have been addressed. It’s the people themselves who knew what the issue was and how it could be solved. What we do need is a disruptive way to turn their inputs into insights that can be used. Algorithms can therefore save communities time and money in analyzing qualitative inputs. Modern
NLP (natural language processing) algorithms already do similar work in companies like Google and Facebook. Software cannot create wisdom of its own, however, and organizations still need to openly engage if they want to get solutions. Building Ownership
While helping organizations to ask around 1,000 questions, we quickly discovered that residents want to own their advice. It’s not about the “what,” but also about the “how.” If street lights were to be installed without asking the residents, they wouldn’t feel ownership. A top-down approach usually generates resistance. Communities are based on commitment, and commitment requires ownership. Great managers are always looking to spread the ownership around. They understand that residents who “own” a program are more likely to support it. If the same program would be dictated in that top-down approach, reactions might be different. Technology can certainly help us think together with many residents. But if we want it to be the savior of civic engagement, we need to find a way to make residents own their change. More and more residents understand that town hall meetings have little impact on decisions. Residents need to know what happened after the meeting. This is where technology can be disruptive again. Waze, Wikipedia, and other collaborative platforms succeeded in spreading ownership. We need technologies that facilitate real engagement with
We need technology to help us move away from ideation contests into language processing. Once that happens, local government executives can address the insights, without spending time and money to aggregate them.
real people, with the capacity to turn “e pluribus unum” into a reality, making everyone part of change. We need technology to help us move away from ideation contests into language processing. Once that happens, local government executives can address the insights, without spending time and money to aggregate them. We need online engagement to generate unique value that town hall meetings simply cannot offer. Let’s not be afraid to ask. Local governments that ask questions are local governments that understand they don’t know everything. It requires courage and humility. Instead of trying to use technology to bypass authentic engagement or replicate town hall meetings into the digital world, we must look for disruptive ways to manage engagement. Technology can certainly solve the pains of civic participation. It can help people ask the right questions, turn inputs into insights, aggregate key themes, and even create ownership by updating residents on their personal impact on the final decisions. Closing feedback loops with thousands of residents requires technology. Then again, there are two things that cannot be replaced by algorithms: the need to engage and the willingness to listen. It is therefore time to talk again with residents and not be afraid to ask. Smart technologies are there to help us make this process faster and easier than ever before.
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COMMENTARY
Rediscovering Maslow Turning to Psychology for Modern Management
By Vince DiMaggio
A Sense of Accomplishment
As local government managers, all of us at one point
Vince DiMaggio is assistant city manager, El Cajon, California (VdiMaggio@ cityofelcajon.us).
or another probably have studied myriad public management theories. From scientific management, through Gulick’s rather unruly acronym of POSDSCORB (Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Coordinating, Reporting, and Budgeting), to Barnard’s authority theory and the need to be both effective and efficient, to the more modern “neomanagerialism” where politics are used to achieve goals, we, as public administrators, have examined, studied, and perhaps written about the strengths and weaknesses of these various schools of thought. It is a virtual certainty, however, that our daily lives as administrators are not governed by a strict—or even casual—adherence to any one of these management philosophies, nor should they be. Instead, our individual management styles are most likely formed, for better or worse, from our experiences working for other managers earlier in our careers. In my case, I worked under the venerable Dave Mora, a former ICMA president, during his tenure as the city manager of Salinas, California. This experience shaped my own style of city management. Despite the vast array of scholarship around public administration management theories, it is perhaps ironic that the theory that could potentially benefit managers the most is from the world of psychology: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (see Figure 1 on page 39).
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Maslow’s hierarchy is a theory of motivation. If managers can understand how their actions affect where an assistant or aide sits on Maslow’s hierarchy, they stand an excellent chance at successfully implementing the specific programmatic initiatives that accomplish the political goals and objectives set for them by governing officials. Administrators, for example, who see a constant need to inject themselves into the minutiae of every step of a program assigned to one of the department directors will, in all likelihood, prevent that department director from achieving any sense of accomplishment in the task. This will adversely affect his or her ability to manage and attain efficiency in the department’s overall goals and objectives. The result is a stagnation for that department director at Maslow’s level three. The director will constantly struggle with the psychological question of “belonging” and appreciation within the organization, along with introducing imperceptible self-doubt into the person’s mindset. Conversely, a manager who allows a department director or assistant to assume the reins of a major administrative initiative vital to the organization’s operation or political objective is, in essence, challenging the person to strive to successfully accomplish the goal. Psychologically, the director benefits from being trusted, reaffirming his or her status within the organization to both internal and external clients. Nurturing Confidence
I have experienced firsthand that when I have steadily increased responsibilities for department directors, while simultaneously allowing them to define
their own path at accomplishing a given objective, then directors’ confidence in their abilities and performance in the job have dramatically increased. It is also true that members of the department view the director with increased status and esteem and are more likely to agree with direction given to them. The fact that managers’ fortunes rise or fall based, at least in part, upon the accomplishment of various objectives (political and otherwise) in the organization is often the primary reason for reluctance at assigning greater independent responsibility to the corps of department directors. I’m not advocating for an abdication of oversight by managers. But, if we start with the basic and necessary assumption that our department directors are capable, credentialed professionals in their field, we must then be completely confident
and comfortable with their abilities at taking on more complex projects, with greater independence, that move the organization in the direction that we’ve been charged with guiding it. Maslow’s highest point on the hierarchy is “selfactualization,” and he described it as the fulfillment of the highest needs and attainment of one’s full potential. As to whether this is actually possible, I will leave that argument to the psychological community. Cultivating Organizational Trust
For managers, we should use Maslow’s hierarchy as a guide for inspiring and challenging skilled directors to greater achievement. By doing so, we cultivate organizational trust between that position and the manager, enhance the self-esteem of the department director, and strengthen the positive perception of the department director by both the employees who are not leaders and the public. We also challenge ourselves to relinquish micromanagement tendencies, thereby increasing our own self-awareness as managers and moving one step closer to self-actualization.
Motivation increases as needs are met
Motivation decreases as needs are met
Selfactualization
FOR MANAGERS, WE SHOULD USE MASLOW’S HIERARCHY AS A GUIDE FOR INSPIRING AND CHALLENGING SKILLED DIRECTORS TO GREATER ACHIEVEMENT.
Being (growth) Needs
Esteem Love/belonging
Deficiency Needs
Safety Physiological Figure 1. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. J A N U A RY/ F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 9 | P U B L I C M A N A G E M E N T | 39
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MANAGEMENT
Manage This By Robert (Bob) LaSala
How to Be an Amazing Mentor
Make a positive impact on others with these mentoring tips.
1. Be an empathic and reflective listener. Listen
deeply to people’s answers. Simple reflection or mirroring back to the mentee is a powerful process that supports you being fully present and listening with both your heart and your mind. Empathic listening doesn’t mean agreement but does convey understanding. This is a prerequisite for the use of all coaching and mentoring skills. In doing this successfully, you have a heightened sense of awareness. You then can articulate and describe what is going on with the mentee at this moment. This skill helps mentees connect the dots, so they can see the picture they are creating by their action or, sometimes, lack of action. 2. Ask multiple open-ended questions. Use the
Socratic method. Ask “learning questions” to explore experiences and beliefs. Using this method fosters disciplined and thoughtful dialogue and explores ideas in depth. It promotes independent thinking and gives the mentee ownership of what she or he is learning. Use open-ended questions, “why” questions, and viewpoint questions, as well as implication-and-consequence questions. All these types of questions promote original thinking for mentees and helps them learn the depth of their understanding-or lack of it. It can also uncover new and better ideas while the coach can gain the trust and support of mentees. 3. Invest time to get to know people as people.
Coaching must be relationship-focused. Until the mentee knows that you care, she or he will be reluctant to be open, candid, and forthcoming. Share personal aspects of one another’s lives that may be unknown, yet appropriate to know. Your success as a coach is directly related to the quality of your relationship with the mentee. Rapport and trust are foundational in the coaching relationship. Seek out communication techniques (e.g., make “acknowledging statements” and pose acknowledgment questions that tie to the client’s and the coach’s shared values. Use statements that make it clearly understood that you suspend judgment and that you give the benefit of the doubt. Clearly convey when you are making as-
sumptions and practice curiosity while you remain humble in doing so. Where and when appropriate use self-deprecating humor to create a level playing field). These can create a connection and mutual respect. 4. Understand peoples’ roles, goals, and challenges on the job to be helpful. When you understand
these factors, you develop an overview of mentees in the larger context of their organization. Without this frame of reference, the coach will not be as effective in shaping the discovery process for mentees. 5. Set clear goals, roles, accountability, and time frame. Then explain the “why.” Explore shared account-
ability in co-creating the experience. Work to establish a shared vision for success based on a clear sense of direction, key objectives, and an explanation of the direction in which you are headed. Observe behavior and share feedback on the impact(s) of those behaviors. Reinforce forward progress that ties back to these goals, the vision, and direction. Be clear about what you are responsible for and what the mentee owns so that accountability for results is understood. By setting time frames, additional boundaries are set to ensure forward progress can be achieved and measured. As the final part of this, explaining the “why” makes intent clear and sets a context in which the work and progress can be better understood and appreciated. This sets a framework or a backdrop for action. For more resources on how to make a positive impact on others, visit icma.org/icma-coaching-program.
Robert (Bob) LaSala, ICMACM, former county administrator of Pinellas County, Florida; executive coach; and ICMA Senior Adviser, Dunedin, Florida (rlasala1@gmail.com).
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MANAGEMENT
Leading Practice: Borrowing from Within
By Marie Peoples
How a County Health Department Solved a Critical Staff Vacancy Organizations of all sizes experience
Marie Peoples, Ph.D., is chief health officer, Coconino County Public Health Services District, Coconino County, Arizona (mpeoples@ coconino.az.gov).
unexpected vacancies in critical positions. This article shares how a county department, through the support of innovative county leadership, was able to manage a critical position vacancy. Things change. Often. Occasionally, leaders enjoy hallmark moments when all key staff positions are filled, there are no major fires to put out, and there are no critical community or resident needs to address. These moments are short lived, perhaps as they should be. In today’s fast-paced world of local government, being stationary may equate to stagnation, especially in the public eye. As the chief health officer of a large health department, being staffed is critical to the mission of providing public health services, especially clinical care. Due to national shortages of health practitioners and administrators, especially in rural areas, recruiting and retaining clinic staff can be a full-time job. Plus, there are not any good times to be without key staff. Due to unforeseen circumstances, our department was unexpectedly found without a clinic manager. I was balancing multiple competing priorities and being without this position was a critical pitfall. Regardless of why a vacancy occurs, local government managers know that the absence of critical staff
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can create havoc on projects, operational flow, program or project outcomes, delivery of services, and employee morale. Often customer service, key projects, and staff momentum cannot afford to stall during the recruitment and hiring processes. Prioritizing Needs
After assessing the available staff within the public health department, I concluded that due to projects and other vacancies it would be unwise to add additional work to another team member’s plate. Enviously, I thought of several skilled emerging managers from other departments. Wouldn’t it be great if I could borrow someone for three months? That time frame would allow clinic operations to continue and the hiring process to be completed or near completion. After considering operational needs, I recognized that an expert in medical practice, insurance, or billing was not needed. In the short term, a leader was needed to meet with staff, to ensure daily operations, to facilitate policy reviews ahead of a licensure visit, and to maintain staff morale during the turnover. I also needed to ensure that the next clinic manager was a good fit. What were the attributes required for a
good “fit”? The short-term borrowed leader could help me assess the position ahead of the job posting. I floated the idea with the county manager. Coconino County managers and the board of supervisors have long enjoyed a reputation of leading through innovative practice. This situation proved to be no different. The manager was supportive of the proposal, if other department directors could spare staff. Identify What’s Needed and Ask for It
Coconino County has a rich talent pool, and some 15 emerging leaders were identified with the help of human resources. An outline of the opportunity and short-term responsibilities were developed and provided to the respective department directors. After director approval, an e-mail announcing the pilot opportunity was sent to each of the potential candidates. As expected, several candidates opted out for various reasons. Several candidates were still available, so brief interviews were scheduled and two candidates identified. This all occurred within one week. Who says government cannot move fast? Clinic operations at that time were crucial, loss of grant funding had resulted in layoffs, and morale was low. After interviewing the top two short-term candidates, I realized I wanted both to join the department’s team.
One had great leadership and team-building experience, while the other had a wealth of personnel and policy skills. In the end, I asked for what I needed by proposing that both work in the clinic 25 hours per week. They would work opposite each other 20 hours per week so there would always be a leader available, and an overlapping five hours per week so they could touch base.
WOULDN’T IT BE GREAT IF I COULD BORROW SOMEONE FOR THREE MONTHS?
Benefits of Borrowing From Within
A multitude of benefits were identified, but the theme that was most observable was the power of the generalist. Subject-matter expertise cannot be negated; however, true leadership is composed of many transferable skills. The two emerging leaders were undoubtedly skilled in their daily work but unfamiliar with clinical services. It did not matter. Both were strong generalists and helped forge staff relationships and identified key skills needed to permanently fill the position. This also provided emerging leaders with an opportunity to develop and hone their skills, which ultimately benefited the entire organization.
New Tool to Tackle Public Health Staff Sharing The Center for State and Local Government Excellence (SLGE), with support from the Center for Sharing Public Health Services, has released a new checklist to help public health departments evaluate the appropriateness of sharing staff among two or more jurisdictions and to communicate about staff sharing arrangements with elected and appointed government officials. Staff Sharing in Public Health: A Checklist for Communicating with Elected and Appointed Officials, available for download online at https://www.slge.org/resources/staff-sharingchecklist-for-public-health, outlines important considerations related to logistics, governance, and organizational culture. The checklist has been organized into five sections, each corresponding to an action that is critical to successful staff sharing arrangements. SLGE helps local and state governments become knowledgeable and competitive employers so they can attract and retain a talented and committed workforce. SLGE
identifies leading practices and conducts research on public retirement plans, health and wellness benefits, workforce demographics and skill set needs, and labor force development. Access SLGE publications and sign up for its newsletter at slge.org and follow @4GovtExcellence on Twitter. J A N U A RY/ F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 9 | P U B L I C M A N A G E M E N T | 43
MANAGEMENT
Four Steps to Successful Resident Engagement Colorado Springs Involves Community in Complex Projects
By Nina Vetter
sometimes complex public process-driven projects. Here are the four steps of the Colorado Springs process. Step 1: Engage Everyone Early, and We Mean Everyone. A local government can be quick to find those
While elected official support is crucial to the
Nina Vetter is manager, Pueblo West Metropolitan District, and former strategy and performance administrator, Colorado Springs, Colorado (nina.l.vetter @gmail.com).
success of major public projects and certainly reinforces staff teams’ perceptions of the quality of their city’s process for completing projects, team members knew they were truly successful when hearing this response from a resident: “I do not agree with everything, but I like some of it, and I appreciate the time you took to listen to us. It was a good process.” This comment was from a woman who was engaged in a city process from Day One, when we had met with her and 50 other residents of a mobile home park in Colorado Springs, Colorado (465,100 population), to listen to their concerns and fears about a recently passed transportation subplan. The Colorado Springs council had unanimously passed the North Nevada Avenue zoning overlay, design guidelines, and transportation subplan in January 2018. Together, these items were the first of a kind for the city to initiate. Before the subplan passed, however, the council had also approved the Renew North Nevada Avenue master plan in March 2017. More than 900 people in the community participated in that process. Success wasn’t due to our project teams’ intelligence or expertise. It was largely due to our transparent, equitable process that required patience, honesty, listening, and, quite frankly, boldness from all the people who participated in the process. We believe it can be a model for other communities to use in implementing major, sometimes political, and
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advocates who will side with it when starting a new project or a process, and they are important. To be successful in large public projects, however, particularly one that will restrict future use of private property in a large area, it was vital that Colorado Springs brought individuals involved to the table early, despite their history with the city or what the staff thought their opinions might be. It is important to be aware of any biases that staff members might have going into a conversation or a meeting. It is easy to be affected by past interactions with individuals or what might have been said about them. Build relationships. Staff members met with private property owners and area neighborhood organizations before we even held our first public meeting, including both advocates and naysayers. Yes, as you can anticipate, people vented, voiced concerns, yelled a bit, but it also gave the project team an opportunity to get to know people on a personal level. To truly manage a project and provide a nonbiased opinion on the outcome, understand those who are vested, literally, in a project. Never underestimate the power of building good relationships. Let them be heard. Every local government has important community partners that play crucial roles in development and future planning. From the onset of the transportation project, we formed a steering committee of community partners, including an elected official representing a city district, the city’s chief of staff, and representatives of related city boards and commissions. They were the first to know what we were developing, when, and how it was going to be shared. Committee members were also given real opportunities to shape the language used to explain what was happening and how the subplan items were delivered.
Step 2: Ask for Feedback That You Will Use.
There are good times for the use of an open-house format, but sometimes it is not the right mechanism for public input.
At the beginning of our process, we literally had nothing to show people other than a map of the area under study. Our intent from the beginning was to create a master plan that truly represented what the community wanted, not what the city wanted, so we didn’t want to start with a product or draft that assumed we knew what people would say. At the first workshop, we showed a map, introduced ourselves, and then asked people to spend 30 minutes to vision the future. We had people sit at roundtables, asked for their input through a series of questions on a printed form, and then asked them to prioritize their vision in a table or chart format on one form. This second part was the secret sauce to success, and the group dynamic allowed people from different backgrounds—mobile home park resident, local business owner, resident of an adjacent neighborhood—to get to know each other and their respective concerns and enthusiasms.
FPO
Repeat “Conflict is okay, breathe, adapt” in your head before every public meeting. We have all
probably heard it before: Conflict can be a good thing. This sounds nice until you are in the middle of a public meeting attended by 200 people, city manager, and councilmembers, and there is a resident insisting that someone else is “the master puppeteer behind it all.” Cue panic and desire to “get this meeting under control.” But wait, breathe, adapt. Let the resident finish and then calmly remind people of the intent of the meeting and how they are going to be asked for their vision of the future. Often, people just want to be heard, and sometimes they wait until they have just the right audience to do it. At each meeting, we always took 10 minutes to answer questions before moving on, which allowed people a chance to be heard if they truly wanted the time. Sometimes this lasted 15 minutes, but the opportunity for people to speak their minds allowed them and everyone else to work productively in their roundtable discussions. Did every meeting go as planned? No, not a single one; however, we received helpful input and everyone felt heard. This is what you told us and here it is. A quick way to lose
public trust is to ask for public input and not use it. We made sure that after each workshop and after each online survey, we took the feedback and then showed how the input resulted in a piece of the master plan.
A QUICK WAY TO LOSE PUBLIC TRUST IS TO ASK FOR PUBLIC INPUT AND NOT USE IT.
We shared it at the beginning of the next workshop and through an e-mail newsletter. It is important to show people how you took their feedback and incorporated it into something tangible. Step 3: Remember to Keep Everyone Informed and Repeat the Same Message.
Our elected officials were an important part of the processes we were undergoing. They would ultimately determine whether we had anything in place at the end of the day that they could support. We presented updates to them every few months, highlighting the vast amount of public input we had, and showing them short videos of participants in this process explaining why this was so important to them. Most importantly though, we kept repeating the same message. I cannot count the number of times we said: “We had 900 participants involved,” “This is a community-driven plan,” or “The end products will represent a majority of what we have heard from the community but with almost 900 people involved we cannot make every individual happy.” The repetition of these phrases and this information helped make it stick. Step 4: You Cannot Overcommunicate, and Please Thank Everyone.
You have a finished product, now what? When we had the master plan completed but before it was formally on the city council agenda, we met informally with several elected officials over a span of two weeks to hear any concerns before we brought it forward. Since we had provided councilmembers with multiple updates throughout the process and also had one councilmember heavily involved in it, only a few concerns surfaced. When we did present this project to the entire council, we made sure to thank the participating councilmember several times. Keep communicating with your participants. After the
master plan was approved we had a lot more work to do, including the zoning overlay, design guidelines, and transportation subplan, and we wanted to make sure people knew the approval wasn’t the end. To this day, we still send a newsletter when we have updates on what is happening in and around the corridor. People appreciate being thanked and being notified of anything happening in the area. After all, we had 900 residents volunteer to take time out of their day to participate in the process, and they truly are the reason we were successful. If you want to see more of our plan or process, it’s available online at www.coloradosprings.gov/ renewnnave. J A N U A RY/ F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 9 | P U B L I C M A N A G E M E N T | 45
MANAGEMENT
Wellness the Right Way
Design Your Organization’s Wellness Program from the Ground Up By Jessica Higgins to Boost Productivity It used to be that the harder and longer you
worked, the more respect you earned from your peers. Those long nights and blurry eyes were the sign of a dedicated employee. Thanks to our digital-first world, we’re now on 24/7 whether we like it or not. People tried to maintain that good old approach of long hours equals dedication, but they started experiencing burnout. With the invention of working on our cellphones, iPads, and other electronic devices, we end up driving ourselves mad. The first to really expose us was Arianna Huffington. In 2016, she became vocal on the importance of sleep,
wellness program from the ground up to boost productivity. Otherwise, a nap room could just get in the way of the work. Your true goal here is to make everyone more, not less, effective. You will find one or two areas where everyone really struggles. Whether your solution for that is work-fromhome days, silent work days (quiet offices, fewer meetings,
THE MORE YOU TRULY COMMIT TO CARING FOR EVERY SIDE OF EMPLOYEES, THE SOONER YOU WILL OVERCOME THE DISENGAGEMENT VIRUS THAT ORGANIZATIONS FACE TODAY.
Jessica Higgins is chief operating officer, Culture Design Group, Miami Beach, Florida (Jessicahiggins.co; @jessquired), and the author of The 12 Essential Business Communication Skills.
a fairly radical departure from priding ourselves on our service to our organization by sacrificing our bodies to the grind. Now, it seems that every organization I work with is rolling out some version of a wellness initiative. Having run the gamut from onsite health coaches to installing sleep rooms, here are the essentials you need to know to have an effective wellness program without it costing you a lot of money.
and different collaboration and communication practices), limits on nighttime e-mails, healthy food options, or even 15 minutes at your desk with online fitness coaching, there is an Internet innovation to solve nearly any issue today. A wellness program becomes a productivity program—when it serves people better and serves organizational purpose as well.
1. Begin with purpose setting.
Don’t let wellness become group rhetoric. Great leaders are those who see that we must treat each other as a whole person these days. Life and work have intersected; we have no choice. Organizations that commit to caring for their people will always outperform those who don’t. My work designing organizational cultures proves this statistic to be true time and time again. The numbers may not be short term, but retaining an organization’s best employees and cultivating them translates into big savings over the long term.
A local government manager, for example, probably doesn’t want to play table tennis. So often, a wellmeaning leader will retrofit best practices they read in articles just like this one, costing money and increasing distractions at work. Or worse, having no effect at all. This is simply an ill-thought approach that people will not embrace. Begin by asking employees what attracts them to work with you day-in and day-out, and what could make that process better. Design your organization’s
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2. Commit to caring.
The more you truly commit to caring for every side of an employee, the sooner you will overcome the disengagement virus that organizations face today of employees who are physically present but who have mentally checked out. 3. Embrace small changes.
Every organization has a wellness program already, whether you like it or not. If hunching over a desk for hours at a time is your status quo, well, that’s your current wellness program.
My point here being, you don’t have to gain widespread buy-in and launch an overt initiative to have wellness at the office. Making small changes, over time, can have a nice net effect on employee wellness and engagement. Take after Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple, and start encouraging employees to take walking meetings outdoors. Or set a five-minute calendar invite to remind people to get up and stretch. Whatever you do, no matter how small, will help you and others extend happiness for all. Matrix_PM_Nov2018.pdf
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