Congratulations. You’re in power. Now you must sit down with your fellow assembly members and come to some agreement about what you’d like to get done.
This will be your most single most important achievement and it’s not as difficult as it sounds. But it must be done at least annually, perhaps even quarterly, or your leadership will be blown astray like a rudderless ship in a storm.
Without your to-do list and attention to it, you won’t be setting the town’s agenda. Your manager will set it. Or the mayor will set it. Or your finance officer will set it. Or your police chief will. Power abhors a vacuum. Translated, that means if you don’t lead, someone else will.
This is how you can come to agreement. It has worked smoothly in the past.
After the election is finalized, hire a professional facilitator and – previous to a planning meeting – have the facilitator survey each of you on your priorities, average the responses, and distribute the results to members. That will give you a sense of what issues you agree on.
At the actual planning meeting, allow each member to argue for their top priorities. After that, give each assembly member allotted 10 or 12 ballots, allow members to distribute their ballots on the priorities they like best.
The tally of ballots will provide you a list of goals, prioritized from the one with most assembly support to the least.
Until the next election, this list is your marching orders. Hand it immediately to your manager as his/her top priorities. Print out the list and paste it on the wall in the assembly chambers. Attach it to every assembly meeting agenda. Stick to it.
Even with such a list, you’ll hit opposition.
My assembly, elected in 2016, ranked police spending as its lowest priority during its planning meeting. Within a month, police chief Heath Scott arrived at an assembly meeting with an eyes-only dossier purporting that crime was spiraling, and that along with the opioid crisis and removal of a blue-shirt trooper, our valley would be awash in crime without hiring a fifth police officer.
History has since shown that Scott’s claims were bogus, but they had their desired effect. My assembly voted to add a full-time officer, then in its following two years, voted for more police overtime and standby time and then to raise Scott’s salary to a staggering $110,000.
Also at our planning meeting, assembly members ranked borough employee travel as among its lowest priorities. But it took the interim manager and chief fiscal officer only a few minutes to block the idea of reducing staff travel, encouraging an assembly subcommittee to instead take a much more difficult path – increasing taxes.
The assembly in May eliminated staff travel, and, not surprisingly, the borough is doing just fine without it.
Near the top of its priorities my assembly ranked increasing recreation opportunities for residents. We got nowhere on that. When we succeeded in opening the pool on Sundays, staff closed it on Tuesdays. We made the swimming pool free for minors for one year, before rescinding it.
One young woman who voted for me on my support of more recreation funding regularly asked me during my term what I’d achieved for recreation. Nothing, it turns out.
I was to blame for not keeping my assembly’s priority list in front of me at every meeting from the start, and for referring to it, continually.
When Heath Scott asked for more money, or when staffers opposed cuts to their out-of-town travel, I should have said, “I’m sorry, but the assembly is in agreement on this topic, right here in black and white. The assembly, elected by the public to represent the public, is charged with leading our community. I ask you to please respect the will of the people.”
To do this is not tyranny. It’s leadership. And that’s the role of the assembly, under borough law.