If one more person says that our rocky history with borough managers shows that our town or its government is dysfunctional, I’m going to scream.
Wait. I scream all the time. Maybe I’ll whisper instead. Maybe someone will listen.
Haines is no more dysfunctional than any other place. There are errors that we make continually and habitually, but that’s not a function of who we are. It’s the result of how we do things. There’s an important difference.
To say we’re dysfunctional is not only inaccurate, it’s an indictment of who we are. It says we are impossible people. In fact, we’re just like people everywhere else, but we have difficulty learning from our mistakes. And when it comes to local politics, we don’t have a long attention span or take a very close look before we’re throwing up our hands and calling names.
And that accomplishes nothing.
Take the current blow-up between manager Debra Schnabel and the assembly. Schnabel’s a good manager, but she needs to be reined in. She oversteps her authority regularly. That’s not a mortal sin. It’s a shortcoming and perhaps a character flaw, but it might be remedied.
Former manager Tom Bolen had similar flaws, sometimes publicly expressing contempt for his bosses on the assembly. But Bolen loved Haines. With some work, he could’ve been a very good manager.
A key to retaining managers who have potential is improving assembly evaluations of the manager. I’ve participated in two such evaluations, and they tend to suffer from grade inflation. The scores of all six evaluations are averaged, and as nearly every manager has a few die-hard assembly fans in their pockets, the result is rarely reflective of serious misgivings that a majority of members may hold.
Even Bill Seward, who proved himself prominently unqualified for the job, nearly passed his evaluation.
Also, it’s tough to sit in a room and speak frankly about the flaws of a person you work with. Most of us don’t even do that with our spouses. Plus, there’s the strange nature of an employee’s relationship with six bosses. That’s a seven-way marriage. It’s going to be awkward even when things go well.
So here’s another approach for evaluations. Bring in a facilitator to confidentially interview each of six assembly members about a manager’s performance. Encourage assembly members to be brutally frank. Have the facilitator take those comments to the manager. Ask the manager to write a plan for addressing criticisms.
Under this system, managers would know exactly where they stood with their bosses, and that’s good. It keeps everyone honest. Other improvements would be having managers continually report to the assembly on their activities, via email, and limiting manager participation at meetings to providing options and making recommendations.
Leaders also need to make changes to improve the assembly-manager relationship. First is developing a list of assembly priorities. This should happen each year, immediately after each election, to re-adjust the government’s goals in accordance with voter intent as represented by the results of the election.
One year’s assembly has every right to undo what the previous year’s assembly did. That’s how democracy works.
A list of assembly priorities needs to be attached to every meeting agenda or posted to the assembly chambers wall. The assembly developed such a list at a December 2016 retreat, shortly after Heather Lende and I were elected.
We never saw the list again. Our agenda quickly filled with day-to-day questions of governance and the priorities of the manager, or of the police chief, or of some special interest seeking assembly support.
After a while, assembly members start feeling like a panel of advisors or judges, not leaders. And that leads to disenchantment or resentment, or both.
Finally, assembly members need to have the power, in code, to place items on the agendas of their own meetings. Inexplicably, they don’t have that power now.
This community must be led by its assembly, liberal, conservative or somewhere in between. It needs a good manager to lead the staff in achieving the assembly’s priorities and goals.
Like your car, that’s a functional system. Its breakdowns prove not that we’re dysfunctional or even bad operators, but that the system needs regular maintenance and its workings sometimes need to be tweaked.