Updated Fri, Jan. 14 with revised info and "added comments" at end of this document on how the Lake County Board of Commissioners could indicate they actually have taxpayer fiscal interests at heart:
Tue., Jan 12, 2011, Tavares, FL: Today's Lake County Board meeting was a "workshop" where they did NOT allow public input, and it started late at 9:30 or so and went to 2pm without a lunch break. Two disappointing major "consensus" decisions were made. Who is pulling the Puppet strings???
1. Emergency Operations Center: Four of five Commissioners voiced a "consensus" vbte, including new Commissioners Leslie Campione, Jennifer Hill, Welton Cadwell, and Sean Parks (Jimmy Conner voted NO), to continue spending funds for the architect and a consultant to develop definitive costs for the Emergency Operations and "Communications" Center - was estimated to be $11-million, now maybe $9-million. Reading between the lines, it seems at least four Commissioners will approve the $9-million project once costs are better defined. This was a total reversal of Campone and Parks stands earlier. About half, or $4.5-million would come from "free money" (my words - Federal and other grants), and the other half, $4.5-million from local taxes, such as obligating future sales tax collections. There was a dog and pony show for EMS (Emergency services - ambulance) and Fire Rescue services to lead up to the pitch for the EOC center which now will have space for 130+ dispatchers and a room to house computer servers from the County Clerk. Every department in the County seems to have asked for space in the building, even though the staff has been reduced by 100+ employees. I never saw any decent analysis of actual savings, costs, etc. like you would see in a Corporate presentation, so it is based on buzzwords like "the staff needs a room to decompress". In the days of a good economy and high tax revenues, this might be expected. However, there still is no talk to spend funds to develop GOOD economic development programs, GOOD job skills and job finding programs, or GOOD programs to fill all the local foreclosures. So, my opinion is that spending money on more buildings is more important now to the Commissioners and staff than jobs (except for the construction jobs, which mostly go to non-Lake County employees or immigrants), economic development or fixing the foreclosure situation. Very dis-heartening.
2. County Manager - Last week, Campione and Parks stood up to the other 3 Commissioners and requested that a hiring committee or headhunter be used to find a GOOD County Manager to replace interim Couny Manager Sandy Minkoff. BUT, today, there was a complete flip, led by Sean Parks, who voiced support for promoting newly hired, and untested, Deputy County Manager Darren Gray to County Manager. Earlier, I had looked at Gray's resume and did not find ONE measurable accomplishment where he actually showed progress in measurable terms, such as "reduced costs by 21%" or "increased revenue collected by 8%". Thus I consider him to be untested and do not know whether he has skills to actually improve conditions in the County like Economic Development. Campione stated his skills were mostly in budgeting, which is a routine process, not a leadership process. Will he be just a continuation of the prior management and not take action on needed priorities?
I talked to several other observers and they were all amazed at the complete flip of Campione and Parks. What happened to turn their objectivity? Who is pulling the Puppet strings? Both Parks and Campione said they looked at Gray's resume and thought it was much better than the resumes received in the last advertised opening for County Manager. But that was a mismanaged recruiting program and they did not use a professional headhunter. They only placed ads at a time when there was a lot of contention in the news about a year ago. It seems they would rather save the $50k for a good headhunter rather than get a County Manager with a stellar track record and leadership skills. They could have interviewed local leaders like John Drury, City Manager from Tavares; Russ Sloan, head of the Business Resources Center at Lake-Sumter Community College; or the City Manager of Leesburg, Jay Evans; or Alan Winslow, a retired manufacturing executive who is currently the Chairman of the Lake County Republican Party, but they did not (and we don't know if those KNOWN leaders would have applied).
The problem is that some of us observers have actually worked in billion dollar companies and know what a good manager and leader could be, and Lake County just lost that opportunity.
So, with the EOC locking up future revenues for 2-3 years, and an untested County Manager with no track record of measurable accomplishments and no experience being the top guy in charge of a City or County, what will happen to Lake County jobs, business development and the foreclosure problem?
Oh yes, did you hear that Florida State's budget will be short $3.5-4-billion and the Federal Government will not have any stimulus funds and may be cutting their own discretionary budget by $35-50-billion, which will cascade in effect for Lake County funds (especially for Schools).
Time to go to Maggie's Attic in Mount Dora and have a good wine. (which I actually did).
vj
Update with Added Comments & Solutions: Friday, Jan. 14:
Three days after the above decisions (which are both "consensus" agreements, not final votes - the final votes are upcoming, so some could "flip" their decision again, but I doubt it), I have these added comments:
The decisions by Campione and Parks resulted in public comments to me like they telling environmentalists that Al Gore owned a company that beat baby seals to death for their fur. I was amazed at the negative reactions of local Republicans and Tea Party members I talked to. They considered the decisions to violate Republican or fiscal conservative principlles followed by those groups, who were both courted by Campione and Parks. Here are some more comments AND proposed solutions:
The EOC Center Decision: I and others have fought this project because of the lack of sound analysis to back up the original EOC proposal, which then was more than doubled to include space for 130 dispatchers and others. One problem with this project and others is that staff and the County Manager's office take the attitude that their presentations are to inform the Board, and not the public. So, if the Commissioners don't make sure all the facts are accurate or they don't discuss in public the information they receive "behind the doors" by staff and lobbyists, the public only sees half the information which may not be enough for the public. The staff or County manager may give detailed presentations to individual Board members and "educate" them, but then never provide the same information to the public or to all the Commissioners (my opinion). Frequently, you see Commissioners not talk at all about issues, and vote to approve $1-million in spending without much discussion because they have received details earlier.
For instance, the County half of the EOC costs would primarily come from future sales tax revenue that are specifically dedicated to capital projects (construction, large equipment) and not "soft" projects like staff wages, utility costs, expansion of staff at the animal shelter. Because the staff doesn't make presentations with the public in mind, It was not clear to me about that process until a list of future Sales Tax Revenue was provided by staff at this week's meeting. Basically, the County has an estimated annual sales tax revenue of $10-million per year through 2017 when the legislation for it expires. As mentioned, those funds can only be spent on capital projects, such as loan payments for the infamous $35-million Motorola Radio system. So, smart staff, knowing there is the pot of gold there, make presentations for projects to spend those funds. In this case, they even are trying to lock up future sales tax revenues. Jimmy Conner made the point that by promising the future revenues NOW to projects removes the ability to use if for reserves, or to deal with possible drops of 10-20% in tax collections, or deal with unexpected needs like a bridge collapsing. For instance, the County assumes that they will get $10-million per year in sales tax revenue for every year through 2017.
So, even if the Board voted down the EOC center, or scaled it back to just an EOC center which is mostly paid by Federal and other grants, they would find something else to spend the money on. So, I give up. Fiscal Conservatives should remember this when attempts are made in 2016 or 2017 to extend the sales tax legislation and decide if all the current projects provided by the Sales Taxes were worth it, or should they cutoff the funding source because County staff and Commissioners were just spending it to spend it for the benefit of vendors of capital projects and products.
If Campione or Parks or the other Commissioners had said IN PUBLIC that if the EOC center wasn't built, the funds would still be there and be used for other projects, people might have bought in more on their decisions. Jimmy Conner, was consistent in his principles and questioned the merit of promising all available tax revenue (other projects already receive some) without holding a reserve of 10-20%.
The Approval of Darren Gray as County Manager (Which somehow sounds like an old movie title): This was another "consensus" vote and the final, official vote will be at an upcoming meeting. Commissioner Jennifer Hill and the attorneys are working up an employment agreement. At this time, the only "condition" requested by the Board during the public meeting was to require a performance evaluation in six months.
The consensus was started by Sean Parks who mostly said he thought Gray's resume was much better than the ones received about a year ago when the County advertised for applicants. That recruitment process was amateurish and didn't use headhunters or much advertising, so they got mostly people out of work. The reason to hire a headhunter (which was not done in the past, and was not proposed this week) is to find a really good applicant who has a measurable track record and probably isn't looking for work. The job of the headhunter (having been through the process myself) is to understand the employer culture, find a good match, and sell the position and positive benefits to get the target candidate interested in the position. Instead, just posting ads on government job sites and maybe the Wall St. Journal isn't enough to get a leader or qualified candidate with a measurable track record of accomplishments. So, even though Gray's resume looks good to the prior applicants, as I mentioned, he had NO track record of measurable accomplishments on his resume, and he never appeared in public meetings to describe any. That throws up a red flag to anyone from the business world.
AND, there were no performance conditions specified for receiving the position, except for an evaluation in six month. To evaluate someone, you either rely on soft requirements like "gets along with everyone", or you define expected goals lile "develop increasingly tighter production ratios and reduce average cost of six specific services by 15% over the next year". It is easy to just reduce a department by 10%, but a more professional approach is to track performance expectations and replace managers who don't meet new efficiency targets. Government seems to always just increase budgets by 3%, while disciplined businesses would expect managers to REDUCE the average cost of services and expenses by 3-5% every year. Why should government managers not be held accountable for performance measurements like business managers are?
So, the final vote for County Manager probably won't change, but the Commissioners COULD salvage some of their "fiscal" reputations by establishing some tough employment conditions for the position.
First, no severance pay beyond 3 months should be approved.This is now being done by some agencies in Orlando.
Secondly, to protect the taxpayers from paying the cost of Commissioners firing a manager due to irrational thought patterns, mediation should be mandated if the Board decides to fire any contracted employee.
As further conditions for the contract, the Board needs to set some new program priorities (like job training, foreclosure mitigation, or economic development) specify some measurable accomplishments AND timeframes that are expected to set priorities. Most of the existing staff are pretty good and we assume they can and will continue programs and services like in the past. The issue is whether to demand that more be done by the County Manager. He should be asked to accept the following types of conditions:
-Revise the job description for the County Manager to specify how each objective is to measured monthly, how success is defined ( costs are reduced from prior actuals by 12% in 12 months) and in what timeframes. If you can't measure it, it shouldn't receive funding.
- Review all the prior fiscal fiascos we have described on this blog, like the Fire overtime issue, the excess, unapproved $600,000 spending on a recent contract, the reasons for not including the Motorola $1.5-million in the budget, and other surprises. Define and publicize new procedures to prevent such problems (hire an independent contract administrator, as an example).
- Meet with the County Clerk's auditor and initiate an audit charter giving him complete audit rights to walk in and audit any operation for wrong doing (he has the hotline), or for performance, efficiency, and effectiveness. Currently, he has not published any audit reports of County operations since being hired over a year ago. They should be on the website like the School Board does.
- Review the contract with the Metro Orlando Economic Development Commission and develop specific performance metrics and deliverables. Fire them if they don't meet those conditions for their annual cost of about $300,000. Fire the County Manager if he doesn't fire them for non-performance.
- Agree to implement economic development and other project improvement priorities- the employment agreement may specify this is done within one month after the upcoming "visioning" meeting on Feb. 1.
- Define specific, measurable performance ratios for all department services and programs, such as calculating the average ACTUAL costs (including overhead, funds from all sources,etc.). This is called program budgeting and the Federal government is moving to it. Currently, the County only has annual workload or activity statistics contained in the budget sections. I consider them to be at the third grade level of management monitoring techniques. Some managers may have their own data that is much better, but it is usually not presented to the Board.
- Create monthly performance operating reports (not just financial reports) for each department that show monthly, year to date, comparison to planned metrics, comparison to prior metrics. These reports should be completed and distributed to the Board and on the website within two weeks after the end of each month (waiting for three months is not acceptable). Any variances from expected metrics over 5% should be brought to the Board to evaluate why (or the County Manager explains - this is called a variance analysis and is COMMON in business, even on a WEEKLY basis, to ensure operations are efficient and not exceeding planned cost or performance measurment standards).
- Develop action plans with measurable targets and deadlines for new programs in areas such as foreclosure reduction, job creation and job training and other NEW economic development priorities. For instance, initiate a program to reduce empty foreclosures from 5,000 (or whatever the real figure is) by 20% a year for three years. Hold facilitation meetings like you would for Hurricane damage, allocate funds to them (even from reserves) just like the Board did for the Green Fair and other initiatives.
- Watch the above objectives like a hawk on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. Adjust spending and staffing based upon adherence to the plan. This is a businesslike approach to managing services and programs.
- Mandate status reports at least every two weeks for the priority initiatives.
By defining the above measurable objectives and conditions and monitoring performance metrics, the Board could actually show they do have fiscal priorities as well as policy priorities.
vj Fri., Jan. 14, 2011
vj
