Bob writes about what he considers the most important issues facing Bainbridge Island and what he would propose to do if elected to the Council. Here is a reminder of what he was writing in April 2008.
His campaign site is here. He is a candidate for the North Ward.
This is from an email he sent:
The people on this email chain have recently raised a lot of important issues, concerns and questions about city government. However, there seems to be a shortage of viable solutions offered in response.
Although we now have a different form of government, all of the players have remained the same. Unfortunately it is looking more and more like business as usual at city hall. The city needs to do much more than simply turn the strong-mayor into a ceremonial mayor and change the title of the city administrator to city manager. Now is the time for fresh ideas and bold decisions that will take the city in a new direction. The prior government was a failure and the city's shortcomings were not confined to the Mayor's office alone. The problems at city hall are pervasive and systemic. It is the culture at city hall that needs to change. The City Council has an inefficient and flawed decision making process. The Council rarely initiates reforms and typically delegates important decisions to management or committees. This often results in unreasonable delays and uncoordinated and financially unsound decisions. City management is looking out for the administration's interests often at the expense of staff and the community (e.g. paying themselves bonuses while staff are laid off and forced on furlough). The City Council has never been able to prioritize the basic functions of city government which has resulted in millions of dollars being spent on the fun and popular projects while the more mundane but vital city infrastructure repairs and improvements are ignored.
By changing the form of government, the voters have given the city an opportunity to change the way it does business. The city council and the city manager have a clean slate and a blank check for change. The community expects them to use it. Not everything the city tries will be successful, but if they fail to act then there is no hope for improvement. It is not enough for councilmembers to make general statements like: "We need to reduce the size of government." It is already within the Council's power to do that. We need to have councilmembers step forward with specific proposals for making the necessary changes.
During the past year and a half I have offered some suggestions for improving our city government. Since I am no longer on the Council, most of these suggestions have been ignored. Now that I am running for the Council again, I would like to outline some of the actions that I will take if I return to the Council. As a city councilmember I will not be able to implement any of these proposals on my own. However, it has been my experience that when a city councilmember offers a good proposal that is well researched, the rest of the Council generally adopts it.
If elected I pledge to bring the following proposals before the City Council for a vote. I am putting these specific measures in writing so that I can be held accountable if I return to the council.
- Establish Long Term Financial Policies and Priorities: The City Council has never had a long term financial plan. Every year the Council starts its budget process from scratch with a new set of projects and goals. This makes it very difficult to do any long range planning and results in wasted time and money as projects are started, stopped and then started again. The city's capital facility plan is a completely fluid document with major projects, like the police-court facility, slated for construction one moment and then pushed out ten years the next. Hours of discussion and debate will go into scheduling a single project in the plan only to be ignored or undone later. Wing Point Way is a perfect example of a project that has been in the plan for nearly 15 years and was scheduled for construction many times only to be bumped repeatedly. The CFP is a useless document as is the city's annual budget. I don't remember the last time the city successfully implemented its annual budget and completed even half of the project in its annual capital plan. The reserves are another problem. Each year the target for reserves changes and there is no prioritization between putting money in a savings account versus spending on essential projects and services. The Council has always delegated difficult financial decisions to city management. For example, rather than prioritizing city services and staffing resources and then making cuts in the lowest priority areas, the Council simply asks management to cut a specific dollar amount in the budget. Since management is in control of the cuts, they will protect their own positions while laying off the least senior staff members which has created major structural problems in the city organization (see 3 below). The Council needs to develop a solid and sustainable ten-year financial plan coupled with a realistic Capital Facilities Plan. The annual budget process can be used to make adjustments to the long term plan each year but if the assumptions are valid and the plan is reasonable then these changes would not be significant.
- Implement Performance Measures and Accountability Agreements: There has been a lot of talk recently about performance measures, but the city has not shown that it is capable of drafting appropriate measures that will hold management accountable for actual outcomes. During last year's budget process the city manager proposed a set of performance measures for each department. However, most of the measures were related to outputs and activities rather than meaningful outcomes. For example, proposed performance measures for the city attorney included: 1) attending X number of meetings and 2) reviewing X number of ordinances. These are meaningless measures. When the position of in-house city attorney was created, the stated goals were to provide proactive legal advice that would help the city make good decisions thereby reducing the amount of litigation. We also wanted an attorney who was looking out for the city's interests and not merely trying to increase our legal bills. Given these goals it would not be difficult to develop some meaningful performance measures like: 1) Reduce the number of lawsuits filed against the city by x%; 2) Reduce the city's legal bills by $x; 3) Reduce the number of cases appealed to the hearing examiner by x%; 4) Successfully mediate X number of cases; etc. These types of measures would not only be beneficial for the city manager and the city council, but they would also help employees to know exactly what was expected of them. They could plan their work program to meet these goals. Right now I don't think anyone knows how well city employees are performing and the employees do not know what is expected of them.
- Reduce Operating Expenses: The city still has not adjusted to its new fiscal reality. It appears as if the Council's primary goal is to simply break even this year and hope that revenues will increase next year. The goal should be to reduce operating expenses to the point where the city can still have funding stream for a basic capital improvement and preservation program. Roads are continuing to deteriorate, sewer lines are failing, and the city can't even afford to maintain the public property that it controls. It's time to get back to basics and cut out all of the consultants, studies, surveys, planning and non-essential expenditures that the city still has in its budget. There are still staff reductions that need to be made but these should come primarily if not exclusively from management.
- Reduce the size of city management: COBI is
an extremely top heavy organization. As the size of city staff grew
during the last few years, management asked for and received more
members. Now that the city is downsizing and laying off employees, very
few managers have been let go. This has only exacerbated the management
disparity. I have not seen a recent organizational chart for the entire
city, but I believe that about 1/4 of all city employees
are management. That means the city has a span of control of only 1 to
3. The city cannot afford to keep paying for such an inefficient,
ineffective and costly management structure. The city manager should
provide a detailed description of all management positions and then the
Council should formulate a plan for management reductions to take
effect as soon as possible. Based upon what I know of the current
situation, here are some positions that I would likely suggest be
eliminated. Almost all of these positions were created in the last 5
years in response to a growing number of employees. Now that staffing
levels have been reduced, these management positions are no longer
necessary. These changes alone should save the city almost $1 million a
year:
- Deputy Police Chief - Relatively new position. Size of police department does not justify having three levels of management (Chief, Deputy Chief, Lieutenants)
- Deputy Director of Planning - Relatively new position. Department has at least three levels of management.
- City Engineer and Assistant Director for Public Works Operations - These duties should be combined and performed by the Public Works Director.
- Performance Manager - New position in 2008. Essentially serves like a deputy city manager.
- Director of Information Technology - The IT Department should be brought under the Finance Department and the IT Director position eliminated. The city can no longer afford to offer premier tech support. (See 2007 benchmarking study)
- Deputy Director of Finance - This position is also relatively new and may have already been eliminated.
- Reorganize Departmental Structure and Function: Bainbridge Island is too small to have so many departments with specialized employees who work in silos. The city needs to create cross-functional teams to work on projects. This would streamline operations and reduce the amount of duplicated work. We need to have a city manager and department directors that are willing and able to develop such a team structure.
- Reduce the number of external committees, commissions and boards: The city has too many committees which has resulted in overburdened staff, difficulty in maintaining committee membership, frustration of committee members and an inefficient and bureaucratic process that delays decisions - sometimes indefinitely. Committees that the Council tried to strengthen a few years ago are now languishing with almost no members or support (e.g. Nonmotorized committee and Housing Trust Fund committee). The 2007 Benchmarking Study found that COBI has twice as many committees as comparable cities and recommended that the city reduce the number dramatically. Citizen committees can perform an important role for the city, but the number of committees should be reduced and the committee process improved so that they can be used effectively. There are some committees that are required by the municipal codes that have never been formed. Rather than creating many new committees to meet the code and address every controversial issue that comes up and then try to find hundreds of volunteers to be members of those committees, the Council should prioritize its need for advice and reduce the number of committees to no more than 10. Some of the work of very specialized committees may need to be combined with other similar committees. The Council should establish a clear work-flow process with specific reporting deadlines. Adequate staffing resources must be provided so the committees can meet their deadlines.
- Reduce the number of City Council committees: When I was Council Chair in 2006, I eliminated two Council committees (Operations and Capital Facitilies). I've never heard anyone suggest that we need these committees back. There is always a great deal of political maneuvering when it comes to committee assignments and committee chairmanships. Now that we have a council-manager form of government, it is not wise to vest too much power in these committees and allow them to be influenced by two or three councilmembers. I will propose that the Council combines all of the four standing committees (Public Works, Finance, Community Relations and Land Use) into a single Committee of the Whole that would meet twice a month. These committee meetings would be televised, held in council chambers and would comply with the open public meetings act so that all councilmembers could attend. Rather than vest a minority of councilmembers with power and control over a committee's activities, this new committee structure would allow all councilmembers to participate in committee work for all subjects. It would remove the politics of committee chairmanships and committee assignments. It would improve transparency and would make it easier for members of the public to attend since there would be only one meeting where all topics would be discussed. It would lessen the burden on city staff (two committee meetings a month versus the current 8 meetings a month). It is my understanding that the Finance Committee is already meeting as a committee of the whole since all councilmembers are interested in city finances.
- Turn city utilities into legitmate businesses - For years the city's utilities have been a cash cow for general government operations. Most city staff charge some of their time to the utilities. Now that the ratepayers have discovered the flawed system that is responsible for their excessive rates, the city is facing lawsuits which could bring the city down (notwithstanding comments from the city manager about the merits of these suits). Rather than spend hundreds of thousands on litigation and possibly millions in damages, the city should take proactive measures to turn the utilities into legitimate operations. This could take one of two paths: 1) Completely segregate the utilities from general governmental functions. This is how other cities run their utilities. Utility employees are funded 100% by rates and they are not allowed to work on other governmental operations unless the utility is compensated for their time from the general fund. The utilities should create their own business plan that is separate from general governmental capital facilities planning; or 2) If the city is unable to manage the utilities as businesses, then the city should spin off the utilities as a separate public utility district.
- Do not sell city property merely to balance the year end budget - In December 2007 the Council approved a motion to sell $850,000 in surplus property to defray 50% of the costs for purchasing the Williams property. That money was to be used to pay the debt service on the bonds or to retire some of the debt on the property. The Council has not yet acted on that motion. Now it appears as if the Council wants to sell surplus property in order to balance the year end budget and build up reserves. This would not be an appropriate use of a one time sale of property. If the budget cannot be balanced without the sale then that indicates that operations costs are still too high and must be cut more. It is also a terrible time to be selling real estate.
- City Council should approve all press releases and opinion pieces by city management: The recent op-ed in the Review about Winslow Way that was written by a city employee should have been approved by the city council before it was published. Managers are not policy makers. Their role is not to try and convince or persuade the community. With a strong-mayor form of government, the Mayor would generally write opinion pieces on behalf of the city administration. If a staff person wrote an article it would need to be approved by the Mayor before it was published. Now that we no longer have a strong-Mayor, it is essential that the Council approve all press releases and opinion pieces that represent the city's position on a subject.
All of these things are within the City Council's authority to do. If something is not done about these issues it is because the Council has decided not to take any action. The City Council cannot blame anyone else for the city's problems anymore.
I hope that there will be forums and other opportunities for council candidates to discuss and debate their respective platforms. Until then I will continue to send out my ideas periodically by email. I hope that other candidates will be willing to put out their own ideas or react to the proposals that I have put forward. Maybe we can get a good online discussion going among the candidates.
Thanks.
Bob Scales