You know when someone gets on TV who has just ridden a pogo stick across the country and they say "the hardest thing I did was deciding to do it" ?  Yeah, me either, but it is often true that the hardest decision is to crack that first tough nut.  The experts all say that it is downhill from there.  In public policy the experts are often full of crap – the hardest step isn't making that first decision, it is sticking with that decision after your constituents find out about it!!!  

So it is in our fair city.  We took some positive steps last year: the School Board and the Council joined hands and passed our CIP.  This was a much needed and positive step.  However, as difficult as this step was, it is only a downpayment on what needs to happen to get our City back on the right track.  Yes, spending taxpayer money is tough but you know what's even tougher?  Twerking.  

Wait, what?  I was distracted by Miley's latest hit, "wrecking ball".  Sorry.

No, what's tougher is making and sticking with unpopular policy decisions.  The number of people who show up to oppose spending pales in comparison to the numbers when Council even talks about unpopular policy.  Want a room full of angry people?  Have a discussion about reducing trash pickups.  People get pissed!  The City Council has not, in recent years, made these kinds of decisions.  We've spent the vast bulk of our  time on the budget.  We have just started next years budget and the Council will meet 24 times on the budget.  24 times.  Instead of me prattling on, let me just recast this debate in the form of a question: would you characterize the results of our current approach to governance as "successful"?  Are you better off now than you were 6 years ago?  I don't think we are.

Indeed, the Council's response to the problems that vex us has been mired in suburban thinking and policy.  Perhaps if we spend just a little more time on the budget everything will be ok?!.  Bollocks.  We're trying to solve urban problems with rural thinking.  Indeed, the City's population has transformed from a upper-middle income largely white suburb to a lower-middle income enclave with 40-ish percent of our residents being immigrants from central and south America.  The schools have seen this the most clearly although their response was as confused as the Council's.  Talk about sticking to the company line.  We sent "X" number of kids to Ivy League schools!  Yay!  What about the other thousands?  Could they put that on their resume?

The predicable result of this has been seen elsewhere before and now we're seeing it:  at least 1 and maybe 2 rounds of white flight, the business leadership has decamped for tonier surrounds and the schools are struggling.  

Now, I'll take a bit of a break for a cup of coffee and some Slipknot.  I needed a bit of lubricant when I started and will now switch to coffee to maintain that edge…..

Okay, back at it.  See, I believe….no., strike that.  I KNOW that any organization that faces drastic change will only recover and thrive when the leaders of those organizations clearly identify and understand the challenges they face…and are bold enough to take decisive action.  Creeping incrementalism is the plague to be avoided.  Sure, it is easier and events may bypass the problem to make half measures look successful but this is more often the cause of failure than success.  Could be a company, city or nation.

In the public sector, it's the "decisive action" part that is the sticking point.  Decisive action in government is n.e.v.e.r as easy as it looks.  Really great politicians can do it and make it look easy but that's a rare lot.  We've buried the last of those leaders on the Federal level and there aren't any on the horizon.  On the local level you're stuck with the likes of me.  Guys like me try to deliver decisive leadership but mostly we struggle with it.  In defense of my colleagues and myself, we have no staff to help with this stuff, almost no communications media available and have to get up and go to a real job tomorrow.  Nevertheless I'm unfazed by those limitations and if you keep reading you're bound to see me fall on me own sword.  To wit:

So, not for the first time, I'll be accused of parading around like some font of rarified knowledge and it is, therefore incumbent upon me to spill it.  I'll do that but do know that I'm about to get myself uninvited from all of the good Christmas parties and alienate some fair number of people but that's my lot in life and I've shrunk from that role for too damn long.

And….I'll provide particular suggestions in the next post but allow me a bit of foreshadowing:  there isn't a damn thing wrong with the makeup of the City.  The people that live here are the people that live here.  It's up to the leadership to provide better outcomes for our peeps.  We're past the initial shock of the immigration wave.  Time to make some more hard decisions and, oddly enough, the schools are leading the way…..Gimme 2 days and I promise I'll deliver.

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.