Town Hall investigations off base
What Brenner, Younger and Larson are doing is akin to a shoe salesman being summoned to a mechanic’s shop to learn in an hour how BMWs run and what a BMW mechanic really does. Then they will offer advice.
STEVE REID
Editor & Publisher
sreid@lbknews.com
What a nightmare if the boss of your boss finds your work and perhaps your attitude second rate. How long until a justification is found to squeeze you out of your job?
These thoughts and fears are what our town staff must endure as the Town Commission undertakes performance evaluations of each department and singular employees. And to get the results it wants, the committee, composed of Commissioners Dave Brenner, Phill Younger and Lynn Larson, will spend time with individual employees asking the usual: What do you like and dislike most about your job? What do you spend most of your time doing? What would you change if you were king or queen for the day?
And this exercise, masked under the guise of finding and correcting inefficiency and finding innovation, is little more than a ruse to avoid doing the real job at hand, managing the town manager.
And that is not meant as an implication that Bruce St. Denis is performing sub par, it is recognition that the town and its charter are set up to follow a very specific chain of command with defined roles and duties. And yet the commission is running roughshod over these boundaries. The town manager, in an effort to make lemonade out of the exercise, has adopted the position of “I embrace the process and think it will vindicate what I already know—we run an efficient operation, and I am open to any suggestions they may have.”
Now that is a job-preserving attitude—smile when the Grand Inquisitor is looking, except it comes at the cost of his employees and department heads.
Learn from the best, not at the behest
First, the Town Charter provides the boundaries; St. Denis is responsible for managing the employees. In short, the commission sets the mission of the town and the manager’s job is to execute the plan. The Town Commission, if it believes there are square wheels, is supposed to take the manager to task.
At a recent meeting in which Brenner, Larson and Younger interviewed residents who might want to join the evaluation committee, a Longboater asked why the town was not doing what has worked successfully in municipalities nation-wide. That is the same advice our very own town attorney has given on no less than a half-dozen occasions over the past year. That advice is for the commission to look at other communities that are operating at even greater efficiency and with admirable innovation. Then the task is to set performance goals and standards for the manager to reach. He is to be measured against those goals and standards.
In fact, Mayor George Spoll instinctively did no less last spring when trying to bolster his case that eliminating the position of fire marshal makes sense. What he did was find communities that were able to have one individual function as both building official and in the capacity of plans reviewer and chief inspector for fire safety relative to construction and renovation. Spoll went to the meeting and made his case. Now the other commissioners did not go along with Spoll, but the point is, the way to reach peak efficiency and innovation is to look at the tens of thousands of communities nation-wide, find the sparkling examples and implement what works.
Employees forced to embrace process
What Brenner, Younger and Larson are doing is akin to a shoe salesman being summoned to a mechanic’s shop to learn in an hour how BMWs run and what a BMW mechanic really does. Then the shoe salesman will go to the manager of the mechanic shop, suggest changes and offer new ways to do things. And in this analogy the shoe salesman can fire the manager of the shop, so his findings are binding, unarguable and final.
And there is no insult meant to Brenner, Younger and Larson, who mean well and are putting vast amounts of time and energy into the task. Yet the irony is they are displaying little innovation and efficiency in the very approach to this exercise. They are elected to form policy and ensure the town manager is managing effectively. The fact that they are embarking on a complete raking over of Town Hall is the greatest slap to Bruce St. Denis’ face he has yet to endure. What board member of a private corporation investigates every department right down to the nighttime janitor if they were not in effect saying, “We do not trust you are doing a good enough job.”
St. Denis’ response should be far firmer—here is why: St. Denis has a series of bosses whom change every two years. The commissioners usually spend half of their term getting up to speed to understand all the functions of the town. The other factor is St. Denis has to manage actual employees who have been asked to endure no COLAS, reduced benefits, non-performing pension funds and constant downsizing. And guess what? Our town employees from Trish Granger in the Town Clerk’s office to Code Enforcement Officer Heidi Micale perform their work with intelligence and determination that far exceeds the lugubrious employees often found in neighboring communities. If anything, these folks are so personally attached to Longboat Key that it would be more befitting our commission find ways to incentivize and pay them a tad more than to ask for pay freezes, looming position cuts and ongoing inspections of their jobs.
Stuff unionization is made of…
In fact, the lack of protection by St. Denis, coupled with the current climate of appearing fiscally responsible as a commissioner solely by acting as if budget cutting is your primary role, is a call to unionization of the general employees. The Fire Department has fared best in terms of pay and treatment compared to the police and the general employees. Unions forbid such strange, undefined and searching investigations with little stated purpose and no investigative cause defined. After all, if an accurate history is followed, it is the blunders of the town manager, finance department and primarily of past commissions that have imposed the tremendous pension shortfall on the town by abandoning the town’s pay-as-we-go attitude to attempt to obfuscate years of poor pension fund performance by spreading the town contribution out over a timeframe the state relegated as completely unacceptable. So instead of micro managing, the Town Commission ought to:
• Undertake amending our Comprehensive Plan by looking at communities that have the right balance of commercial and residential and are functioning well. Instead, we keep amending codes and ordinances with the attitude: relax the regulations and they will come. What will eventually happen is if the rules on Longboat are relaxed enough in a bad economy, the wrong kind of development will come in a turnaround and the exclusive, wealthy ambiance will quickly vanish.
• Truly evaluate the town manager. Our commission has abandoned any pretense of an annual evaluation. The commission has never given the manager any external criteria to measure his work or to provide goals.
• Make sure we do not overcharge. The manager was supposed to provide a building fees study that the commission must ratify. In short, the town has for almost a decade grossly overcharged development applicants by loading administrative costs that are out of scale with what is fair, legal and justifiable. Former Building Official Randy Fowler railed for a resolution. What we have years later are constant excuses and postponements of the study. Meanwhile, the old fee structure is in place. But this commission has placed no demand on St. Denis.
• Build a community park. Once upon a time the town and Sarasota County were going to develop a community park at the Albritton property. Now the wheels of government may be chiseled square, but nothing has happened. Can one believe this town pulled Murf Klauber’s building permits for inactivity? Tree rings on a sequoia have emerged faster than this park. To add insult, the town has not demolished the aging Albritton buildings, yet it wants to stimulate the business community to help get rid of aging blight. It is these buildings that constitute the oldest and most dilapidated structures, and yet we now own the property and are in hazy limboland.
• Amend the Comprehensive Plan. Our Commission in its efficient brilliance failed to negotiate a compromise and instead chose to further divide a community and herald in a new era of lawsuits. The sad part is the moment of excitement in the approval of the Key Club will strain under a long shadow of challenges and now-necessary revisions to our Comprehensive Plan. In other words the commission will be forced to amend the Comp Plan quickly in all the right ways to justify and substantiate its decision. Of course it will all be done under the guise of an open-minded process and a community discussion. And this guise will merely mask a legal imperative that the town has backed itself into. In other words we have to rewrite zoning rules and the Comp Plan on the fly to avoid losing in court—that appears to be putting the ass in front of the horse. But it will all happen under the banner of an open-minded discussion of our future. Problem is the end point of the discussion has been determined, and we just have to fool ourselves into thinking we are engaging in a genuine process.
• Define GMD beautification. In our town’s desire to take an Obama handout, we allowed FDOT to landscape Gulf of Mexico Drive and erect way-finding sigs and entrance signs. We came to find out that the landscaping and cluster of trees at the north end looks like the I-75 exit ramp to Northport with a triangle cluster of palm trees that bare no relation or continuity to anything else on the island. And then the commission cannot figure the wording of the way finding signs, and forgot to reference the existing sign code that literally would show the way.
The above are few things the Town Commission either needs to address or needs to seriously think about. That is while also dealing with the budget, the pension plans and a $50 million beach renourishment.
So perhaps instead of taking a white glove to Town Hall, they need to look at the staggering number of unfinished items and half-finished projects. They need to strongly evaluate the town manager in an ongoing way, and if he fails to perform, change the management. It is then Brenner, Larson and Younger can apply for his job—of course at reduced pay.
