The Council is as confused as I am
December 13, 2007 by Althea Paulson
Okay not really.
But watching Council meetings this fall and reading the Kitsap Sun’s “Blogging live” report on last night’s Council meeting–at which next year’s budget and Capital Facilities Plan were scheduled to be approved and were not–it’s pretty clear the City has a communication problem that’s even more fundamental than City Hall watchers have previously pointed out.
There’s been quite a brouhaha about City Hall’s five-day workshop on ”leadership, collaboration, and communication” as Mayor Darlene Kordonowy called it in a recent letter to the Sun. People are suspicious of the motives and timing of the workshop, the group therapy aroma of its techniques, and the $24,900 cost to the taxpayers for this latest effort to improve relationships at City Hall. Time will tell whether the workshop produces results.
But the Council and administration have more fundamental communication problems than their inability to create a team culture. They lack basic business communication skills.
How can a Council member who sits on the finance committee be “stunned” in November–after work on next year’s budget had been underway for months–when he learns that nearly the entire Capital Facilities budget depends on the issuance of bonds?
How can the Council show up at the last scheduled meeting of the year and still be unclear about the total debt the City must incur to pay for the latest version of the CFP? At this late date, why do they still have basic questions about how much has been spent on Winslow Tomorrow and what has been paid for?
Consider:
Nezam Tooloee has long experience with budgets in the private sector and here’s what he said last night about the CFP (as reported by the Sun): “I can’t vote on numbers I don’t understand and I don’t understand these numbers.”
Councilman Bill Knobloch, who has the most seniority on the Council, wondered why the feasibility study on a downtown parking garage has continued and is being added to the City’s debt. The Sun quotes City Finance Director Elray Konkel as responding, “The council authorized $4 million for many aspects of Winslow Tomorrow, including the parking garage feasibility.”
Bizarrely, the open space bond for acquisition of the Williams and Meigs properties included money for the parking garage feasibility study and the “Winslow Streetscape.” The bond, according the Sun’s report, went to market yesterday morning, before the Council approved it last night. (Hello, City Hall? Is your bond lawyer there?)
The Council was also baffled about why the CFP, which they had revised so it didn’t exceed $4 million, was re-submitted to them last night in the amount of $7 million. The discrepancy–apparently–was that the dollar amount the Council started whittling from was $3 million light.
But the usually direct Konkel failed to explain the numbers in a comprehensible way, instead offering an excuse: “We did the entire budget in one day.” City Administrator Mary Jo Briggs went on to complain, “It took the staff 3.5 months to do the mayor’s proposed budget. And it took council one day to dismantle.”
How can she be surprised that the Council dismantled the CFP, when Konkel spent the fall sounding the alarm on what he called a ”very highly leveraged” plan?
For months, Council members have begged for nailed down cost numbers on City projects. Councilor Kjell Stoknes, a former appraiser with a degree in Economics, has quizzed City staff on aspects of financial documents, only to receive such muddled responses he admitted he couldn’t understand the answers. At one recent Council meeting, Councilor Debbie Vancil asked how much the City had incurred to date in consulting fees for Winslow Tomorrow. Konkel could not provide her with an total, saying the costs had been recorded in separate categories so he didn’t have all the figures in one place. And it goes on.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. And it’s not the heart-to-heart communication they’re working on now. It’s Business 101: Be clear. Be concise. Don’t lapse into lingo and technical explanations. Answer the question. Pay attention.
City watcher Robert Dashiell suggested in a comment to one of this blog’s posts that Tooloee’s “I’m stunned” remark was political theatre. Maybe so.
Maybe our Council members are such manipulative operators that they know full well what’s going on and play dumb to score political points for some agenda of their own. If so, their strategy is lost on the public, many of whom have excoriated the Council for being rude and obstructionist.
It seems more likely that the problems are at both ends of City Hall, based in political maneuvering along with a heavy dose of learning on the job. With both the adminstration and the Council, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
Winslow Tomorrow, for example, has been presented for approval in a series of packages. Apparently, Council members aren’t always aware of the fine print. And their approval of a project doesn’t necessarily mean approval of going into debt for it.
Adding to the confusion, many City matters involve engineering, finance or law. Even in the private sector, people in those fields are notoriously hard to understand, not because they’re too smart for the average person, but because they speak in insiders’ lingo. They’re often so inarticulate when they speak to the Council that people have to guess at what they mean. Their written work is just as hard to decipher.
Time and again the Council complains about being rushed into decisions without enough information. Or they gripe that the adminstration brings proposals that are directly contrary to an instruction given by the Council.
At the same time, the adminstration expresses its dismay that the the Council continually changes its mind and makes extra work for staff.
These communication misses arise as much from lack of clear speaking and writing as from political machinations or failure to listen to opposing points of view.
So here’s a suggestion for a City New Year’s resolution. Start at the beginning of the communication hierarchy. Give everyone a training in basic business writing and speaking. And you can invite the public, because all of us could use a lesson in communication basics.
Thanks for an excellent commentary regarding last night’s budget debate at our supposedly last meeting of the year. As a point of clarification regarding votes taken during the year for consultant design[Heery Int'l], there is a very important point that is misunderstood about last evenings debate. When voting on spending allocation, such as the design for street scape, I did not vote for council matic bonds to pay for the contract. We are voting with the understanding that the city has budgeted money to pay for it. What is happening now is the administration’s effort to recover that money via long term debt.
As a last point of information, when you issue bonds to pay for a project or property, such as open space etc., the payback is another .7 more than the purchase price. Similar to a mortgage. When you start paying bills with long term debt, that is a warning that we are spending money without any cost benefit or having a life cycle cost for an asset. Bill
It is time that more citizens went to meetings to speak out, and contact other county and state elected officials, even the Attorney General. Express yourself in more public ways. Not just informing a limited group of readers.
Granted you will be sticking your neck out. We have. We stood up for what was right for the last 2 years. As a result we have been preyed upon by the Bainbridge Mafia, silly me not having lived here long enough to know better. Not being the wiser that long time citizens of Bainbridge have been numbed into non action to the point where each batch of unethical elected officials goes unchecked. That many city employees lack basic experience for the jobs they are paid. That even our city attorney can not adequately guide the city to properly interpret code and law at the expense of citizens. That our police department has known thugs used to rough up citizens who stand up for their civil and property rights. I have first hand experience in what I am typing and I have managed to keep dusting myself off and getting back up and stating the facts and expressing my outrage in a public way.
That the city machinery is so disgusting that if their attempts through misuse of authority in our city, police and local courts can not suppress an individual or family standing up for their rights, they take aim at your children. On top sits our Mayor. She does not orchestrate this stuff, she was put forward as a candidate because she lacks the necessary leadership that would jeopardize the status quo.
Once again we elected people who are the Mayor’s cronies and hand maidens for the existing mafia. Changes are not guaranteed simply because we have newcomers. No way.
It is no mystery that the budget is such a fiasco. The fact that there is such a discrepancy (millions of dollars of known debt) evolved because the initial plan for just ramming monies through without the public being the wiser failed. Instead there was some noise by the public, whether it inadvertently became a topic as a result of recent campaign platforms for City Council elections or not. The public became informed and as a result City Council and the Mayor could not just keep doing the same Winslow Way two step at the expense of the taxpayers. Recently, many citizens put their necks out and spoke against the city helping to create an appropriate level of distrust that helped put the spotlight on our local government. Please don’t let this fade.
It goes to show that a group of vocal people can make a difference. We do not even have to be settled on one topic. The fact that citizens get up and state facts and demonstrate huge problems collectively helps steer our community back from the dark side.
Please just don’t blog and have the same conversations on your keyboard with each other. Use the information and your talent you have for uncovering doings to help make a public voice.
Granted the blogs help educate many who would otherwise think that they were getting the news and facts through the Bainbridge Review and the Kitsap Sun and the affiliated Bainbridge Islander that magically appears in your mail box for free. We all need to Get UP and Do Something in a more public way, consistently. Citizen inaction keeps the unwanted machinery running.
Has anyone listed where the millions of dollars in bonds that were approved last night go (besides for open space)? What companies or consultants, who benefits, who are the players? What names keep coming forward? Has anyone compiled and published this list for general consumption?
Bill K. Congratulations on getting sworn in again.
So, since you have access to the documents. Can you provide us citizens with a list of the names of the individuals and companies who benifit from the monies from the bonds approved last night? Those players associated with Winslow Tommorrow and the Parking Garage?
Can you also help us voice our concerns over the lack of basic civil and property rights many citizens like us have been forced to deal with? Can you help make sure that my family and my children will no longer be targets of continued unethical use of city, police and court authority.
Can you help us feel safe in our own home?
The lesson from this year for the incoming Council is to get some fairly definitive guidelines to the administration so the mayor’s preliminary budget and CFP are reasonably close to what the council will accept. Secondly, don’t wait until the week before the last scheduled council meeting of the year to make major policy and financial adjustment decisions.
I think just about anyone who pays attention to city hall numbers and having at least a double digit IQ could see the train wreck that we are now involved in coming down the tracks. Only good thing about last night is that everybody has been civil to each other. From my perspective, the council could, and should have, set the financial limitations by the end of October, and the council would then be enjoying their holidays with a city budget and CFP off to the State. The City Council, not the administration, is primarily responsible for what is happening this year. And part of the problem is having a Finance Committee composed of the three City Council members who are all leaving the council and have not met since July. The Finance Committee isn’t directly responsible for the budget, but they are there to become the more financially informed members of the Council, and to parley that knowledge to the Council as a whole.
Hopefully the new council members are taking this all in, because they are the first council to craft a biennial budget. I’m optimistic that the longer time horizon will lead to more logical capital and financial planning, and certainly to a much more sensible budget calendar.
I have already been interviewed by the Sun and stated that I want the street scape project to be put on hold. Before we can take any further steps, the community needs an accounting of how much has been spent, where the money was used, what the real cost breakdown is and most important, who and how this project will be paid for. If the public approves of this project, then a voter approved bond should be voted on. Bill
Althea’s New Year’s resolution for COBI: “So here’s a suggestion for a City New Year’s resolution. Start at the beginning of the communication hierarchy. Give everyone a training in basic business writing and speaking.” I agree with this but let it be by self-help DVDs purchased off-the-shelf. We have maxed out on big-ticket full meal deal communication extravaganzas. Lean and mean. COBI Council and senior staff need to grow up and start acting like professionals. I am sure we could get a good price quote from WalMart on these business/communication self-help books.
Beside business writing and speaking, how about liberal applications of honesty and integrity? These are free.
Maybe every council meeting should start with the oaths of office…not just when we swear in new members of our local government. This would serve as a good reminder about honor and public service.
Our public servants should engage and represent the voices of the citizens who elected them, not supress them.
Sometimes it is the little things that are most telling. For example, on page III of the “pink sheets” in the preparation materials for last Wednesday night’s budget debate, there was a recap of questions from previous budget meetings, along with the staff’s response. The following is taken verbatim from sheet III:
“46. What are the consultant amounts (not capital or design) budgeted and spent, 2006 and 2007 to date for Winslow Tomorrow?
Answer: All Winslow Tomorrow consultant amounts budgeted or spent in 2006, or 2007 year-to-date, are capital or design related”.
This is not bad communication, this is intent not to communicate. The unfortunate thing is that some of the staff may be getting unfairly blamed. Are they really as obstreperous as they appear, or are they being told by the mayor or the administrator or some other senior staff member to dodge the questions?
A second short post:
It is interesting that when you go to the Mayor’s section of the City website, there is an item under “archived speeches and articles” titled “Winslow Tomorrow and Budget Planning”. Clicking on this one simply dumps you back in the Winslow Tomorrow section, where I couldn’t find the article. I’d love to be able to read now what she apparently wrote some time ago.
I have to apologize to the Finance Department in my criticism of my last submittal. I realize now that they did answer the question. basically saying that every penny spent in the last two years has gone directly into design or should be capitalized as project soft costs. In similar real estate situations I’ve seen that the more grandiose the project, the more items people capitalize.
The COBI Council meeting ended with talk of continuing on Wednesday. In fact that is what was announced, as I recall. The article in Saturday’s Review spoke of a Monday meeting but concluded that Mayor K felt Monday was way too early for the meeting.
Meeting was held today but quite interestingly the cameras of BITV-12 were not present for the meeting. I did read of the meeting on Rachel Pritchett’s blog so she was told of the meeting.
As Justice Brandeis said: sunlight is the best disinfectant. It certainly would have been better for the taxpayers and voters to have seen the Monday session to follow all the budget issues to ground.
What gives with the lapse in coverage? I wonder if the caterer who brought in the meals was also allowed to not show up? An early Monday call to BITV-12 could have easily scrambled a TV crew down there to film.
Hmmmm !!!!