In the previous installment I laid out a bit of path that I intend to cover at some length in this and a subsequent post.  This post will be about what the city government has done over the past 10-odd years.  The City has been through some distressing times.  The illegal immigration problems that followed the immigration wave from central and south America.  Housing collapse, great recession and eventual significant downsizing of the City government.  Hiring a new city manager and his subsequent departure.  Federal lawsuits.  Poorly performing schools.

As I stew on all of that I guess that I have mixed feelings.  On one hand, I'm pretty proud that a group of relative newcomers to local government managed to get through all of that.  We did have some highly skilled help in the form of Larry Hughes and his staff when it came to the Great Recession and our response to that but the Council did have to hold together.  Or at least a majority did anyway.  The "center" held for much of that time.  That seems positive to me.  What I didn't like so much was that, aside from not going broke, not much positive was achieved in that time.  There was Manassas Next and the initiatives contained therein and maybe the neighborhood stabilization initiative but that is about it.  At least in terms of positive movement forward.  I don't include "Education Forward" initiative as that wasn't strictly a Council deal although I will return to that.

One might reasonably ask "why"?  Why did nothing really good happen?  Well, certainly there wasn't any money to do anything ground breaking but that's really not the root of it.  I've served beside 2 different Mayors and, while they have very different approaches to "Mayoring" they do share one belief: the budget is the single most important thing the Council does.  The budget process reflects that priority.  We meet probably 30 times on the budget.  Some are finance meetings, some are work sessions and some are regular Council meetings but we spend more time on the budget than everything else combined….and by a large margin.  When I was first elected we also had 2 all-day Saturday meetings.  Most of the other local government folks I know, including our recently departed manager, are surprised by our budget process.  It's byzantine by any measure.  It's also largely supply sided.  Until 2 years ago we didn't do spending projections!  I'll never forget the finance meeting where our staff introduced our first spending projections.  They were pretty conservative projections with small salary increases and a low inflation number.  Some Council members were so freaked out to see those numbers that they wanted to pull the report back!  We're telegraphing a tax increase!  I understood but didn't share that concern.  I was the one that asked for the projections, I need to understand what a "base case" of spending looks like a couple of years down the road.  I do it in my business and it's a good practice.  I don't know any very successful business owners who don't do this.  It's an integral part of a financial model.

Now, using this process isn't all bad.  Indeed, it served the City well for a good 30 years but I feel that the process itself has become so insular and byzantine that it serves almost nothing but itself.  The death march that has become our budget process has largely become our vessel for a policy making process.  Some will rightly point out that your budget defines your priorities – we spend a lot on schools, public safety and public works.  That's a pretty common set of priorities in local government so nothing wrong there but the point I'm trying to make is that while our problems as a community have changed, our governance and its processes have not.  Simply put, this all-consuming focus on budget, budget, budget has had an unfortunate side effect: our winning strategy, our methodology for dealing with the City's problems has been to make Manassas the cheapest place to live in NoVa.  When all you do is focus on the budget, it becomes the solution to everything.

When I went through my first budget process a line-item copy of the budget was distributed and the process used that 150 page book.  Clearly, the aim was for Council members to understand each line in the budget.  It is proper and correct for Council members to have a thorough understanding of the budget but believe me that there is a finite amount of energy that any Council member can bring to this job.  A finite amount of focus.  Now, then dwell on these two questions:

1.  Is understanding the budget at that level where you want the City's leadership to expend those finite resources? and

2.  Has the method of governance proved successful over the past 6-10 years?  Has being the cheapest place to live in NoVa been a successful strategy?

As my coda, I'll offer this:  if you've read this and think I'm making an argument for raising taxes, please, you're missing the point.  Go back and read it again.  

I'll deliver the final piece of this in a week or so.

 

 When you're climbing on the bike – absolutely grinding it out – your legs are just like metronomes.  Your mind centers on the pain you're enduring but it also wanders onto other topics….but that's somewhat like a dream: you don't always remember what you're thinking about.  Legs tapping out a steady rhythm, shoulders rocking slightly and a steady stream of sweat dripping from the helmet strap…usually onto your legs or the top tube of your bike.  Right at your limit.  Any faster and you'll pop.  Any slower and it just ain't hard work and that's one of the rules of cycling: love the work baby.  The first rule of training is that it never gets easier, you just go faster.

A strange thing can happen while you are in that other world of endurance and work: somewhere deep in that meat between your ears the gears are grinding away on a problem and *pop* a solution squirts through to the front of your brain.  You sit up and and experience a very short, sharp epiphany…without the exposition necessary for such a result.  One moment you're trying to distract your mind from the acid burning in your thighs and the next you're like "holy crap!!!!".  Why didn't that occur to me before?  It's just that simple.

Natch, I'm not going to spend 2 paragraphs talking about such a thing and not have it happened to me.  I'm far too lazy to spend that much mental energy as a throwaway exposition to my real topic.  As I've mentioned previously to the assembled mob, Bike Virginia was in Lexington this year.  Lexington reminds me a lot of Manassas from my childhood.  They have a baker, newspaper, men's clothing store and a coffee roaster: stores where you can buy actual stuff.  I mourn the departure of these sorts of businesses from the Manassas area.  When I was a kid we had our own bakery.  I went to school with the kids from that family.  We had our own newspaper.  It was printed on Center Street.  You could go and watch the presses spin.  To me, the loss of those businesses reeks of a loss of self-determination and a collapse of our collective vision and identity.  A grey, crappy, post-modern Manassas whose future is determined the same way everyone else's is: the quality of the retail opportunities.

There's only one problem with my baked-in hometown fugue:  it occurs to me about 25 miles into the second days ride, halfway up a 4 mile climb that this way of thinking, this assessment of reality is all wrong.  Indeed, it's a misconception that dogs the entire community and we're all better off if we forget the damn thing and move on.  Our problem isn't that we don't have fancy stores or even more stores.  Our problem is that we are still trying to solve urban problems with suburban thinking.

 In the face of advancing chain stores and a titanic demographic shift, no.bod.ee. has doped out what Manassas needs to look like.  In the absence of that vision, the reapers toll has been high amongst local business and long-time residents have been leaving the City.  We're in a decline and we can't seem to get out.  To be sure, a livelier economy has been helpful and it is masking some of the weakness here in river city but we still have unresolved problems.

When this article continues, I'll talk a bit about what we've done.  The third article will cover possible answers.

Next:  The City's response over the past several years….