The Haines Borough Assembly wants the public’s thoughts about reducing borough manager turnover. Here’s my idea: Supervise the next one.
That would be a start, and a first.
Assembly members say they supervise the manager, but how do six people actually supervise anyone? The truth is that the only real “supervision” borough managers get are annual performance evaluations, if they’re done that often.
Even then, the fact that evaluations are typically “averaged” by taking the scores of all six assembly members and dividing that by six tends to conceal issues and problems. With one or two key allies on the assembly, a struggling manager can still earn decent scores, which only masks cracks in the relationship.
Then, when the inevitable break occurs and a manager is fired, the public is stunned. Friends of the manager point fingers. It’s a mess.
The Haines Borough School District offers a better model for the assembly-manager relationship.
School board president Anne Marie Palmieri told me she speaks every day with school superintendent Roy Getchell. Among other things, Palmieri gives Getchell advice on how to carry out directives that come from the school board.
This is healthy and sensible. Getchell is trained in the technicalities of operating a school district. Palmieri, who’s been around here about 25 years, knows something about town and school politics. Working together, they figure out how to get done what the school board wants done.
The system’s not perfect. Before Getchell, the school board – not unlike the Haines Borough Assembly – got rid of two school superintendents in short order. It’s difficult finding highly qualified public administrators who want to live in small, rainy Alaska town and put up with its quirks and prickly personalities.
But it can be done. Once hired, managers need tight supervision because their considerable discretionary power is often tethered to a forceful personality. It’s easy for an ambitious manager to get cross-wise with the public or with the assembly.
A revealing insight into the personalities of managers and would-be managers came in spring of 2017, when Brad Ryan and Debra Schnabel were the two finalists for borough manager.
During an interview with the assembly, each candidate was asked: “What do you do when you’re confronted with a problem on the job that you haven’t faced before and you’re not sure what to do?”
Ryan, who had twice served as interim manager in Haines, said he’d ask his wife.
Schnabel said she’d consult books she gathered while studying for her master’s degree in public administration.
Remarkably, neither said they would pick up the phone and call the Alaska Municipal League or another, more experienced manager in another town. Neither said they would bounce the problem off the mayor or an assembly member whose judgment they trusted.
Neither Schnabel nor Ryan had ever worked as a permanent town manager anywhere.
Ryan had interim experience and Schnabel had a degree in the field, but in career terms, both would be raw rookies. Yet neither thought that they’d have to look very far beyond themselves to tackle even the thorniest problems they might face. Think about that.
This is typical of the personalities drawn to the manager position. As a news reporter here for 35 years, I saw nearly all of them.
Manager Tom Bolen at a planning commission meeting I attended expressed contempt for the assembly. After the assembly approved an engineering contract for the Port Chilkoot Dock bathrooms project, Bolen decided he didn’t like the engineer’s version, and drew up his own plan. He was fired not long after.
Manager Bill Seward – who not only was caught bullying a citizen but also publicly demonstrated he didn’t understand his job description – was handed a Christmas present during his first and only evaluation. The assembly wanted to place him on probation. Members had one question for him: How was he going to address a list of concerns they had about him?
Seward leaned back in his chair like a swaggering CEO and responded that he had an “open-door policy” if anyone wanted to come speak with him. Assembly member Margaret Friedenauer, up to that point doing her best to help Seward, could take no more. Out he went.
David Sosa became borough manager after a career as a Marine Corps officer, including fighting in the Iraq War. As a reporter, I asked him if he had ever worked in any capacity for a municipality, such as shadowing a town manager or knowing one. Sosa’s response was to silently glare at me with an expression that put me in his crosshairs. Perhaps Sosa’s most dramatic local battle was his campaign to sell Mosquito Lake School. Sheer folly.
Ordinary people know the difference between self-confidence and hubris but that distinction is lost on most managers. That’s why an assembly needs to stay on top of their manager, all the time.
So, how do you do that in our form of government?
There are countless options but here are a few:
- The assembly could appoint from its ranks a representative to work with the manager the way the Haines School Board president works with the school superintendent, or
- With voter approval, the duties of the mayor could be changed to include wording such as, “the mayor shall assist the borough manager in carrying out the directives of the borough assembly,” or
- Also with voter approval, the borough could eliminate its monarchial-ceremonial style mayor and return to a system akin to the school board’s, which was in place when the Haines Borough was first formed some 50 years ago: Have a seven-member assembly elect the mayor from its own ranks. Under this arrangement, the mayor would also be a voting, participating assembly member, with a vested interest in keeping the manager and assembly seeing eye to eye. Mayors get an office at city hall, typically across the hall from the manager, facilitating teamwork. In addition, an assembly-based mayor would also add a seventh voice (and brain) to assembly discussions.
Because politicians are born enamored of their own opinions, the current assembly may not cotton to any of these ideas. That’s okay. If they do nothing else, they could at least conduct performance evaluations of managers more frequently, perhaps quarterly. The assembly also should require the next manager to check in with them regularly, in the form of weekly memos explaining what they’ve been working on, explaining decisions they made.
Dave Palmer, a successful manager in Juneau, Petersburg and Craig, advised my assembly in February 2017 that such constant communication is key to a workable relationship between assemblies and managers. It’s advice we should have taken.