City Manager Navazio Takes Over Monday

The policy direction of the city is driven largely by council, or so they will tell you.  There is some truth in that, but the single most powerful position in the city is the unelected city manager.

The closest that Bill Emlen came to presiding over a major land use decision was the approval of Target in June of 2006, and the subsequent approval by the voters in November 2006 and the opening of Target early this year.

While Bill Emlen’s love and focus were on land use decisions, the major issue that arose during his tenure was on the fiscal side.  And while he clearly played a role in helping to direct policies such as the fire department merger and restructuring of departments, he was not the hands-on city manager, crunching the budget numbers on a daily basis.

That is where we might see the biggest change.  Paul Navazio comes over from finance, rather than planning.  Depending on how long he remains interim city manager and if he becomes permanent city manager, the city may end up bringing another finance person in.  But unlike his predecessor, Mr. Navazio will never leave finance behind him.

Sports fans may think of this like a football coaching staff.  You have a head coach who oversees the entire team and operations, strategy, and makes the ultimate decisions.  You have a defensive coordinator who calls the defensive plays.  You have an offensive coordinator who calls the offensive plays.

That is how it is supposed to work, except that most head coaches have either come from being an offensive or defensive coordinator, which means their background and expertise lies with one side or the other.  It is not unusual for a head coach to involve himself with one half of the team’s strategy very intimately and then rely on the other coordinator to be in charge of the entire defense or offense.

From that perspective, we can view city government as being divided between planning on the one hand and finance on the other.  Are there other aspects of city government?  Certainly. 

But Bill Emlen was a planner, and he basically continued to be the titular head of planning, even as city manager.  He thus delegated at least the number-crunching, if not some of the policy direction, to the finance director.

Paul Navazio may be the opposite.  He is a finance guy who will likely keep the budget in his hand at all times.  He will likely leave the major planning decisions to Ken Hiatt and the rest of the planning department.

In the next year and a half before the next round of MOUs and employee contracts, the budget and figuring out how to fix pensions and retirement health will be the biggest issue that the city faces.

To this point, we have tried largely to balance the short-term budget through reorganization, which is not really reorganization per se.  What the city has done is leave vacancies open, and then shuffle the deck chairs.  We have had reorganization then, by retirement.  There is no broader plan, other than moving people around, to cover the most vital services.

The MOUs that were signed reflected this mentality.  We were able to balance the short-term budget with only very modest concessions to the larger problems.  The biggest problems have been put off until 2012, and really the day of reckoning is still 2015.

The city continues to budget by nickel and diming.  However, change is going to come, one way or another.  The new council is likely to push and get multiyear budgeting.  While that may seem like a small thing, it is not.

Multiyear budgeting will force the city to plan for multiple years.  So rather than simply arranging the deck chairs for one balanced budget, the city will be forced to think about how those chairs will impact the next year’s budget.

This is what the school district is forced to do on a yearly basis.  It means that the governing body will have to take seriously the difference between one-time monies and ongoing revenue streams.  It will have to make more accurate and realistic projections about revenue and employee costs.

It will force the city to anticipate rate hikes to PERS and the impact of the unfunded liability.  And the city would be forced to find money for things like road repairs.

That is not to suggest multiyear budgeting is some sort of panacea.  After all, part of the problem has been  projections for revenue that are too rosy.  Overly-rosy projections for revenue are a problem for a one-year budget, but devastating for a multiyear budget, because it  forces cuts not only for the first year but for each succeeding year in the budget.

The hope would be that this would force the city council to be more honest in their assessment of future revenue growth.

Will a new city manager change the way we do business?  Perhaps not.  We have seen that even with a new council, the prospects for true change are fleeting.  However, having a city manager focused on finance all the time, rather than planning, is probably not a bad change.

And so we will look to new eras once again with hope and optimism, at least until that illusion is again shattered by the bitter slap of reality.

—David M. Greenwald