By E. Roberts Musser –
By E. Roberts Musser – -
City Staff is incompetent, so managers and department heads need to be fired.
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The Davis Senior Citizens Commission ignored a certain segment of the senior population.
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City labor negotiations should have been transparent and not completely behind closed doors.
The developer of the proposed Carlton Plaza Davis project approached the Senior Citizens Commission for assistance, after it had made its application to City Staff with no results forthcoming. Somehow the proposal for this facility had been pigeonholed somewhere in the “vortex” of city bureaucracy – whose inner workings are only known to City Staff. I cannot tell you how long the developer was made to wait, but to the developer it seemed unseemly. I do know that City Staff is overwhelmed with its workload at times, which was explained to the Carlton folks.
Essentially forces were brought to bear to get the ball rolling. An invitation was extended toward the Carlton Plaza Davis developers, to make a presentation to the Senior Citizens Commission. Many disagree with this approach, saying if it is permitted without limitation, commissions will be inundated by development proposals. But how is a developer to proceed, if a proper application goes unaddressed ad infinitum, while others are arbitrarily moved to the head of the line? It is a question of basic fairness.
Soon thereafter, City Staff came out with its recommendation that the Carlton Plaza Davis project not be approved. It was then proper political process took hold. To make a long story short, the Senior Citizens Commission, the Planning Commission and the Yolo County Commission on Aging & Adult Services gave their measured input, accompanied by the unconvincing contribution of those entities who opposed the project. In listening to all sides, City Staff changed its position, which was perfectly appropriate. It was clear that mitigation efforts could be put in place to make the project proceed effectively – both the developer and its opposition were willing to facilitate alleviation of the perceived difficulties.
The commission process that occurred was an excellent example of strong collaboration by City Staff, the developers, the opponents of the project, city commissions and ultimately the City Council – once the proposed project was forcibly torpedoed from the city’s “bureaucracy vortex” (bv). But it is the existence of this unfortunate “bureaucracy vortex” I want to now address. Many times I have suggested that more consistent systems need to be put in place as to how commission involvement will take place, to what extent, and when. So far the City Council’s Subcommittee on Commissions (Asmundson and Souza) has been deafeningly silent on this crucial point.
I also recently noted before City Council that retired Staffer Bob Weir of Public Works had it right, in bringing information about sewer/water rate increases to the public’s attention at the inception of the wastewater treatment plant upgrade proposal. He and his subordinates came to the Senior Citizens Commission long ago (years), at our request, when the Commission was first alerted about the issue of potential large increases in water/sewer rates. Over the years Bob Weir and his staff took a lot of heat from the public, including some pretty hard questions from me, but stood the gaff. Bob Weir knew that putting the issue before the public rather than “hiding the ball” was the right thing to do. I will always admire him for his grace under fire and consummate professionalism in that regard.
It is the ability of City Staff to pigeonhole projects/issues in the “bureaucracy vortex” (also known as the “big vacuum”) that I find troubling. It is no different than the practice of pigeonholing a proposed bill in committee to make sure it goes nowhere in Congress at the federal level. This is the crux of the “bureaucracy vortex” problem. Certain unscrupulous forces with political connections figure if it is possible to convince staffers to sit on a project/issue long enough, maybe the project/issue can be made to go away – poof, like a puff a smoke. Most in the public find this practice unsettling and undemocratic, to such a degree it can bring the citizenry’s blood to a boil.
If appropriate governmental process is allowed to proceed as it should, there will still be vociferous complaint from various quarters. But at least all complaints will be in the open, at which time the public can be given the opportunity to refute any fallacies having been previously whispered in the collective ears of staffers. In the case of Carlton Place Davis, City Staff was only hearing the opponents’ version of events and no other. Why was it necessary to employ the use of a “torpedo” to dislodge the proposal from the “bureaucracy vortex”? Proper process should be allowed to take place without the necessity of having to set it in motion through the use of heavy artillery. Dynamiting an avalanche of snow to prevent disaster just doesn’t seem an effective method of governance to me.
Which brings me to my next point. A series of three editorials that appeared in the Davis Enterprise on Feb. 2, 2010 made it seem as if the CHA viewpoint was ignored in the political process in regard to the proposed Senior Housing Strategy. If anything, CHA has been trying to “game the system” by misrepresenting the facts in a public forum. City Staff gave CHA members and supporters plenty of time to give their opinions on the proposed Senior Housing Strategy. But in listening to all sides, as City Staff is supposed to do, it found the opinions of the Senior Citizens Commission considerably more logical and persuasive.
In consequence, City Staff incorporated the Commission’s suggestions into the evolving Senior Housing Strategy, rather than CHA’s minority view. CHA then proceeded to mischaracterize what happened, claiming the Senior Citizens Commission ignored CHA and proper process was not followed. Now the Senior Housing Strategy is back in City Staff’s “bureaucracy vortex” for more “consideration”. Meanwhile CHA and the Covell Village developers are turning up the heat, hoping enough pressure can be brought to bear – so City Staff’s resolve to do what is in the best interests of Davisites will crumble.
Finally, the issue of process was raised by the Davis Enterprise in the Feb. 14, 2010 column “Our view”. The article stated “For too long, the Davis City Council has gone behind closed doors to bargain with the city’s employees…Our council must end this practice and negotiate on behalf of the public in front of the public.” The People’s Vanguard of Davis was light years in front of this issue at its inception, calling for just what the Davis Enterprise is demanding – some transparency in labor negotiations. But the Vanguard was demanding it before labor negotiations started, when improvement in transparency would have made a difference.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the City Council needs to start looking at the flawed political process that is going on, and make some serious fixes. City commissions, the Vanguard, the Davis Enterprise and others (myself included) have all called for something to be done about the current defective procedures or the absence of proper procedure. The City Council should aim toward more transparency, giving City Staff clear direction on what is expected in furthering that transparency. The City Council should also do whatever it can to improve opportunities for public input in a variety of ways. The behind the scenes machinations that have resulted in poor planning, public resentment, commission bitterness at being omitted from the process, public spats amongst City Council members themselves, needs to cease and desist.
Lesson to be learned: Politicians need to understand how important governmental process is to citizens. Transparency and ample opportunity for public input, either through public comment or city commissions, lends a sense of fairness to local governance procedures. A lack of fair process does nothing but generate distrust of government and its representatives, and the end result is inferior planning.
Elaine Roberts Musser is an attorney who concentrates her efforts on elder law and aging issues, especially in regard to consumer affairs. If you have a comment or particular question or topic you would like to see addressed in this column, please make your observations at the end of this article in the comment section.
“I cannot tell you how long the developer was made to wait, but to the developer it seemed unseemly. I do know that City Staff is overwhelmed with its workload at times, which was explained to the Carlton folks. “
Elaine, reasoned thoughts as usual, thanks. What is your evidence for Planning Staff to be overworked. I believe David has found that the staff is at same ir near same levels today with little building as compared to “boom times”.
What could be put in place to make staff accountable for timely attention to applications? It appears much is driven by staff and if they want to pidgeon home it in the vortex they can easily.
“What is your evidence for Planning Staff to be overworked. I believe David has found that the staff is at same ir near same levels today with little building as compared to “boom times”.
What could be put in place to make staff accountable for timely attention to applications? It appears much is driven by staff and if they want to pidgeon home it in the vortex they can easily.”
I know City Staff was inundated with work when attempting to develop the Senior Housing Strategy, especially when City Council would not allow a senior survey to be done. In consequence, City Staff had to scramble to find data to back up any assertions made – bc it was clear City Staff was going to get severe pushback from CHA/Covell Village developers on anything less than what CHA/Covell Village developers want.
Why shouldn’t any developer who has put in an application to the city have his/her proposal reviewed by city commissions??? In my opinion, the City Council Subcommittee on Commissions should direct City Staff to allow developers who have turned in an application to bring their development proposals to the appropriate commissions. It doesn’t seem fair for City Staff to pick and choose arbitrarily.
Now I might have to eat my words if someone can explain to me why the present system is appropriate and working as it should in a fair and balanced way. I will be the first to admit I am not that familiar with the inner workings of City Staff and the application process. But in two cases recently, projects were not allowed to come before commissions until there was an outcry or were not allowed to go before commissions at all – Carlton Plaza Davis and the Measure P development respectively. Yet there did not seem to be any good reason why these two projects were kept in the “bureaucracy vortex” outside of commission purview.
the city’s “bureaucracy vortex”
Good topic Elaine. I am an outspoken critic of government business for a number of reasons. Lack of process – or more precisely, lack of efficient process – is a big one. However, I see this as being at least partially symptomatic of other root causes.
In my business I hire talented people to solve business problems. I recognize them and reward them when they demonstrate initiative and deliver results. We don’t fix the process as a singular project or event; rather we constantly improve our process as measured primarily by customer satisfaction. As the manager, my job is to provide my employees everything they need to get the job done. As the employee, their job is to work as a team, taking risks to constantly optimize the process within the constraints of the required rules, regulations and laws. If I, as the manager, get too deeply involved making detailed decisions for how to change the process, at least two undesirable things happen: 1) I make mistakes in judgment because I am not working in the trenches enough; 2) employees defer to my authority and effectively shut down their enthusiasm to take ownership of the process.
When we add politics to the mix, then, on top of these two things, we also get employee job/career risk aversion.
So, inefficient processes are developed by politicians or management and worked by unmotivated, unenthusiastic, decision risk-averse employees. It is a recipe for mess.
So, although I agree that effective defined process can help all organizations perform, I see the root cause of these problems as being more systemic and environmental. Because the cost of government labor is now significantly higher than private sector labor and continuing to grow, we are naturally ramping up our service performance expectations. We need to completely rethink how we structure and fund these government-run service “businesses” (yes, they can be viewed and structured as separate and independent businesses). They have an inventory of products and services they are chartered to provide. Those products and services should have defined quality and performance “service-level” attributes. For example: “ how many days from request to delivery. “ We need to implement state-of-the-art management and leadership and then restructure the compensation system to pay for performance and results and eliminate the job-for-life security model. We need to encourage and reward risk-taking (short of recklessness) seeking higher customer satisfaction. We need to de-politicize the staff positions… politicians and managers need to take all the heat for performance issues, not staff. It then becomes management’s responsiblity to fix the “people” problems that deliver the efficient processes that deliver the quality services.
I use the analogy of good business as like catching and surfing a perpetual wave. If you fall behind you have to paddle like crazy to catch back up. Right now I think most government business needs to paddle like crazy. Citizen’s involvement can only nibble at the edges of these problems.
Boone: lack of efficient process
You are talking about processes that are designed to be extremely efficient, which in all too many cases are not understood by the general public. I’ve actually seen people at the CDD counter positively *irate* because they didn’t understand the need for a resale inspection. Contractors stomping their feet and pulling their hair because “those idiot inspectors” don’t know what the hell they’re doing (they do). And most laughable of all, developers with attitude demanding to talk to “whoever’s in charge here” because *our* City staff strictly adheres to land use law and policy.
Read Ms. Musser’s comments again. The problem here isn’t “Staff”, it’s small-town politics at it’s absolute worst, and for the most part has nothing to do with “process”.
Neutral: I read the article and understand your point. However, part of the reason that members of the general public are irate is that they have become used to high customer service in most other aspects of modern life. It has been proven over and over again that people are likely to be satisfied with service when they are treated as valuable customers, explained the process and kept informed of the process status. City staff tend to be very dismissive and maintain an expectation that it is the public’s responsibility to learn and understand a quagmire of rules that event the city employee barely understands. Requests go into a black box and it takes an enormous effort to track progress and resolve problems. That is the problem.
Boone: City staff tend to be very dismissive
Leaving aside the extremely broad brush here, in my experience Staff – at least for the past 30+ years in Building + Planning – have always done their jobs in a professional manner, and haven’t been dismissive at all. On the contrary, they take the time to walk the public through the process.
Neutral: Based on your characterization of *irate* customers and “small-town politics”, I don’t think my brush was/is any broader.
My experiences with staff are that some are more customer-service oriented than others. My experiences with customers are that some are more demanding than others. Good customer-service practice demands satisfying the most demanding customer. “The customer is always right” cliché, even though practically incorrect, means something.
As a long-standing and experienced developer/builder in Davis, you probably figured out the steps and tricks for getting good service (e.g., getting your project applications approved, permits issued and inspections completed). You might have even considered this a competitive advantage. However, there are many other customers of the planning and development department that have neither the time nor energy to become experts at this level… and should not be required to do so in my opinion.
I will admit that I am a little jaded on the topic of city planning and development service quality because of specific related problems I am dealing with within the city of Pasadena. I think Davis’s services are a few orders of magnitude better than the dysfunction in Pasadena, but still not what I would consider them demonstrating consistent high-level customer-focus.
As an aside, I had my roof replaced last year and the contractor was complaining about Winters building department. He said the permits were more expensive than Davis and the city staff was terrible to work with. I was surprised. I asked about Davis’s staff, and he was complementary. About 20 years ago I had a pool installed by a company that had never installed a pool in Davis before. It was the first and last they ever did (because of the permitting and inspection process and people)…. and they were in business for another 15 years after building my pool.
thanks for your very imformative article Elaine. We all know that this project is completely white washed. [edit]
if the whitcombes were to provide solar homes for seniors that cut down on emissions and cost and were about 150k and were affordable to ppl on social security, then i would be all for covell village…
[edit, no personal attacks, please]
Neutral,
it’s obvious you are a member of the city staff. the staff is rude and dismissive because they have a financial reason to put down citizens and give attention to developers. were it not for these wasteful housing programs, ppl in the city staff wouldn’t have enough money for their wasteful bloated salaries.
screw the city staff and their greed.
why the hell are these ppl still being allowed to work for us?
fire the lot and start over.
100k for a community development job (foster and hess) is way too much money.
thay should be the first to be fired…
they are greedy, corrupt, and unsanitary.
Boone: Neutral: Based on your characterization of *irate* customers and “small-town politics”, I don’t think my brush was/is any broader.
Point taken.
Good customer-service practice demands satisfying the most demanding customer.
The ‘rest of the story’ is that despite those irate, ill-informed, and power-tripping “customers”, the staff remained calm and professional, and got them to the information and/or personnel they needed. Your roofer story is the norm, the pool company not.
As a long-standing and experienced developer/builder in Davis
Much farther down the food chain, but educated and informed about the process.
Neutral:
I think this is a good discussion and one thing I would throw out there is that my beef with city staff has always never been with the rank and file staffer, the staffer that the public contacts. My problem is that I think people at the top have basically been promoted past their point of competence. So if you look at the department heads and the managers, I have serious questions. Many of these would be quite competent at lower levels but are clearly not good department heads.
David: but are clearly not good department heads.
I disagree overall, but I’d give them failing grades on that part of the job that includes educating and informing the public to make sure the processes of governance are clear.
Sorry Neutral, but department heads like Katherine Hess who has caused the city to be sued for her incompetency in approving the permits for the NewPath cell towers “erroneously” as well as her recommendation against Carlton Plaza, and her many other screw-ups I have seen posted on the blog. Like when Hess bailed out of a Memorandum of Understanding which betrayed the poor Chiles Ranch neighbors. And what about when Hess tried to disregard a Fish and Game ruling to protect the 50 foot riparian buffer in the Willowbank Park proposal screwing over those neighbors are just a few examples of her lack of ability and destructiveness.
We need to start getting bumper stickers out there and collecting signatures to demand Hess’ dismissal. This is to save our community from more pain from her incompetency and living with her terrible planning decisions and to protect us from any additional financial costs to Davis residents due to her continuous screw-ups. Why can’t we get a planning director which is qualified, competent with a planning background for the $166,000 annual salary that we are paying Hess? Hess apparently does not have a planning background so it is not hard to understand how she has been such a failure as the planning director. How and why DID she get her position?
If someone is willing to get these bumper stickers produced I’ll bet we can get LOTS of folks to put bumper stickers on their cars which say:
Save Davis…Fire Hess.
“We need to start getting bumper stickers out there and collecting signatures to demand Hess’ dismissal.”
City staff takes its direction from the City Manager, who takes direction from the City Council. The buck stops with the City Council – in this case the City Council Subcommittee on Commissions. It is the Subcommittee on Commissions that needs to implement clear direction to City Staff – on what processes are to be implemented – to make sure all development proposals come before commissions for consideration.