Many point to turnover at the borough – and particularly in the borough manager’s position – as a sign of community dysfunction.
Those folks should look a little more closely. The deeper cause of manager turnover, as well as a major, overlooked problem with our government – is turnover on our elected assembly, the group that hires and fires managers.
Besides inhibiting our local leaders from developing much in the way of leadership skills or institutional memory, assembly turnover causes manager turnover.
Let me use a personal example. I was elected to the assembly in October 2016 and was critical of the then-manager, who had been hired by a previous assembly. By December, all but one member of the assembly became convinced that the manager (who had been hired in July) was not qualified and dismissed him from his job.
After one term, I stepped down from the assembly in 2019. The assembly member who took the seat I had occupied was part of a majority on the incoming assembly that wasn’t satisfied with the manager that the assembly I served with had hired. That assembly terminated our manager.
Consider: Most assemblies “inherit” a manager hired by a previous assembly. With our current rate of turnover on the assembly – very few members serve more than one term and members often resign before serving a full, three-year term – it’s no wonder that managers turn over as well.
Rookie assembly members are expected to learn a lot in a short period of time, then to make decisions – under pressure – based on what they know. That pressure naturally gets transferred to the borough manager who is the only employee of our citizen assembly, serving as the assembly’s right hand, eyes and ears.
Further, nearly all the managers hired since government consolidation in 2002 have been rookies at the job themselves. Thus, we often have a rookie-heavy borough assembly managing a rookie manager who is managing the borough.
That’s a challenged leadership team in a town whose population leans heavily toward old-timers, folks who’ve been here for years and who sometimes know more about borough issues than managers or assembly members.
Add to this equation controversial issues, fiery personalities and a long winter, and government quickly becomes a powder keg just waiting to explode.
Here are some suggestions for changing the equation into something less explosive, potentially helping retain both assembly members and managers:
- Reduce assembly terms to two years. A two-year term would encourage more candidate interest. Two years also coincides with the number of years that discouraged assembly members often serve before quitting.
- Restore health benefits to assembly compensation. Assembly service is one of the toughest volunteer jobs in town. Health benefits were offered to elected leaders for years. For some, that perk served as incentive to run, to serve a full term and to apply effort.
- Launch an open public forum independent of assembly meetings where community issues might be discussed before arriving in the door of local government. Such an informal forum would, by its nature, reward creativity instead of competition between opposing views. Make the forum convivial, open-mike style at the museum with refreshments on First Fridays.
- Hold an annual goal-setting retreat after every October municipal election to acquaint assembly members with each other and with the manager, and to establish goals for the coming year, starting with the goals set the previous year.
- Establish in borough policy that interim managers will be hired from outside of existing staff. The past practice of turning over the interim job to the borough clerk made both the clerk’s and manager’s jobs impossible.
- Add a deputy manager to the borough staff. Not only will a deputy position increase productivity and reduce stress in the manager’s office, it provides an automatic succession plan when a manager leaves the job: The deputy becomes the new manager.
I encourage Haines Borough Assembly members to consider all or any of the above options or to suggest their own. If we are willing, we have the tools available to us to make the borough more manageable for the leaders and staff we look to for leadership.