Civics 101

Civics Tidbits
Who gives orders in City Hall?     When is a deficit not a deficit?     Voters don't care
 
Royal Oak is a shiny apple, with a brown spot or two.
The political arena is Royal Oak is similar to what it is/was in Worcester, Mass., from where new city manager Tom Hoover comes, according to Worcester Magazine writer Chris Kanaracus, who interviewed VersagiVoice to ask what Hoover is stepping into.

Kanaracus focused on obvious micromanaging in both cities in his report to his local readers. He also included my characterizing Royal Oak's administration as "good to excellent," acknowledging that all is not terrible in Royal Oak.

All of which causes me to comment that in decades of management consulting, Muriel and I have used a shiny apple analogy to reduce the understandable uneasiness employees feel when an outsider has been retained to study their company's operations. Versagi Consulting's opening comments, orally and in writing, include:

Think of your company as a person in generally good physical condition who gets a doctor's checkup before going on a cross-country 100-mile bicycle tour.

Think of your company as a bright, shiny apple which happens to have a couple of brown spots. We'll be working on the brown spots, but let's never forget that the bright, shiny apple is there.

That is VersagiVoice's perception of Royal Oak. Sure, this website criticizes public individuals and public entities as seems appropriate -- the brown spots, in my view. But VersagiVoice also occasionally praises those same individuals and entities -- the shiny apple.
 

 Citizens who seek transparency in government owe it to public officials, elected or appointed, to pay attention.
Probably unavoidably, city government is complex. Procedures needed to assure accountability, unless understood, often appear stupid or suspicious to laymen.

The tendency of too many public servants to dilly-dally or simply to refuse to reply to legitimate requests from residents and business owners is a problem.

Even those activists who try to follow civic events and governmental activities get lost among the departments and bureaus and committees and contract agencies which may deal with a single topic.

Try to track, for example, a proposed development through the Downtown Development Authority, the Planning Department, the Plan Commission, the Zoning Board of Appeals, and the City Commission.

There's a customary sequence in which each entity is involved, but circumstances may upset that sequence, as happened concerning the radio tower which is proposed to be built on the City Hall parking lot and which seems to be happening re the proposed location of a clubhouse for the mentally ill on Catalpa.

None of that unavoidable complexity, however, keeps a resident or business owner -- or civil servant -- from losing patience with the individual who has made no attempt to understand, but instead complains loudly at public meetings and hearings and in the press.

Frequently the result of confusing procedure and people (see column at right), this unfocused anger often leads to name-calling. And name-calling is very different from objecting to, say, a commissioner's position or with how that position is presented. [See]

Some say they want transparency but object to debates being aired openly. Those who feel that way say that displaying differences makes matters worse. The Catalpa Conversation about the clubhouse for the mentally ill and the Downtown Dialogue among the several entities involved with attracting more merchants, "real retailers," come to mind.

Opposed are those who maintain that open argument, public debate, so long as no participant hides his identity, is transparency at its best.

 So many times, in both the public and private sectors, criticisms of people are really objections to procedures.  
 It is a mistake for a resident to question the integrity of a public employee just because the resident is upset with the employee's decision. As VersagiVoice has commented before, tax-paid workers are often caught in the middle: if they insist on following rules and procedures, they are criticized for being nit-picking bureaucrats; if they exercise judgment and grant a variance, they are accused of favoritism.

At the other end, it is not unknown for bureaucrats to use their detailed knowledge of policy and procedure simply to stonewall or to make apparently legal decisions in the background, out of the public eye. One Lansing official boasted to me, "If a contractor gives me a hard time, I  manage to misplace his file."

Nor is it unknown for officials to pretend that their personal procedural preferences are official "policy."

There are instances

  • when an individual gets "in wrong" with a public servant and is forever harassed or denied consideration
  • when the same public servant is considered hostile by residents and business owners with widely different points of view and with very different temperaments, leading one to suspect the civil servant is the problem
  • when the dislike is both procedural and personal

Often, Versagi Consulting solves what at first looks like a personality conflict by pointing out that Sam doesn't like Sue because he associates her with a procedure to which he objects. When the procedure is modified or explained, the people problem is resolved.

 

 
Re city finances
 When is a deficit not a deficit? 
During her presentation to the Royal Oak Republican Women's Club, Oakland County Clerk Ruth Johnson criticized Governor Granholm and crew for repeatedly claiming that Governor Engler had left a "deficit" when he left office. By Constitution, there can be no deficit, Johnson maintains. She uses the term "shortfall" to describe the situation when expenditures are greater than revenues in a given time period.

In Royal Oak, Finance Director Don Johnson has repeatedly said that the commission incorrectly refers to a "deficit." In an email to Johnson about another matter, I chided:

Ruth didn't touch on whether the budget or the revenue-expenditure was "balanced," but I can't escape the conclusion that it is intellectually impossible for laymen to understand CPA-types after more than a sentence or two!

Johnson replied:
The language isn't very precise, is it?  Mr. Wally Whipple called me yesterday and read a dictionary definition of "deficit" which included expenditures greater than revenues and also negative variations from a budget.  So, there are at least three legitimate definitions and they all represent different circumstances.

 
However, the Michigan Uniform Budget and Accounting Act  (Public Act 2 of 1968)  defines it as follows:
 
141.422b (4) “Deficit” means an excess of liabilities and reserves of a fund over its assets.
Since this is the state law that governs what we can and can't do in regards to municipal accounting and budgeting, this is the definition I use.  Under this definition, Royal Oak does not have a deficit in any fund. (emphasis mine)
 
Unfortunately, there is no simple standardized term to describe a situation where expenditures exceed revenues.  In the private sector, we would call it a "loss" and we would call the opposite situation a "profit" but those terms are not generally used in the public sector.  Maybe they should be. -- 31 Oct 07

Who gives the orders in city hall?
Separate from, but brought to observers’ attention by, the Drinkwine/Miller brouhaha is the issue of commissioners making excessive demands of Staff – in apparent violation of the city charter, which states:  

Except for the purpose of inquiry, the Commission and each of its members shall deal with the Administrative branch of the Government solely through the Manager, except in the department of Law, and neither the Commission nor any member thereof shall give any order or direction either publicly or privately, to any of the subordinates of the Manager.   

“Common sense” applies in the real world, says City Manager Tom Hoover, whose approach is that commissioners may conditionally communicate with Staff. The conditions are: (1) Staff will keep the Manager in the loop by reporting each such communication, and (2) No actual work requested by the commission will be performed without the Manager’s approval. 

Asked about two specific cases, Hoover tells VersagiVoice, “Yes, I approved Finance Director Don Johnson’s work requested by Commissioner Miller.” About Commissioner Drinkwine’s request to City Clerk Mary Ellen Graver for a 5-year tabulation of attendance at CITCOM meetings, Hoover pointed out that the City Clerk, along with the City Attorney, is a position which reports directly to the Commission. -- 24 Oct 07

Most voters don't know, don't care.
Sometimes, I wonder if it wouldn't make sense for elected local officials simply to ignore residents most of the time. Voters or not, residents are often uninformed or ill-informed, especially when they are emotional -- whether angry or enthusiastic. Consider:

54,614 people live in Royal Oak, in 30,282 dwelling units (homes, condos, and apartments.)*
48,187 are registered voters
15-18,000 -- 32-37% -- vote in typical off-year, local, elections. (36,669 -- 76%-- voted in the November 2008 Presidential election.)

and . . .a mere 600 have signed up to receive City Hall's weekly email alerts.

Scott Newman, Manager of Information Systems, reports that the podcasts of the ZBA, DDA, and Plan Commission meetings draw 20-30 hits per meeting. CITCOM averages 60-76, with a high of 170 for 03 March 2008. ('Twas a full agenda: liquor licenses, pension considerations, the Internet Filter/Library debate, etc. See the minutes on the city's website.) As is true of Community Media Network (CMNtv) Royal Oak's Public Access channel WROK does not have the capability of measuring how many people watch its broadcast of meetings, either live or as reruns. Let's take a guess and say that viewership is four times higher than email subscriptions. That gives us 2,400 active city hall watchers at most.

Newspapers are able to report only about a small percentage of what goes on at city meetings, and there is no realistic measurement of how many people locate and read such items among the many others in a given issue.

The reality is that only a small cadre of citizens can be expected to be knowledgeable, or at least familiar, with city business. For the most part, whatever the issue, major or minor, downtown development or location of a no-parking sign, people speaking or emailing for or against the issue don't have a lot of information and represent only a tiny minority of the population, of voters. That doesn't mean the uninformed shouldn't be listened to. NIMBY matters, of course. But so does the General Welfare. Elected officials, though, should feel free to judge most issues primarily on their merits.

*These data are from SEMCOG re Nov. 2008. Related numbers: 28,616 of the dwelling units are occupied. Residential vacancy rate in Nov 2008 was 5.5%, compared with 3.5$ in the 2005 Census. Total dwelling units in 2005 were 29,942, meaning we have more now than then, despite the drop in population.

More SEMCOG data: 8% of Royal Oak residents didn't graduate from High School . . . 23%  have a High School Diploma . . . 29% have an Associate Degree or have some College education . . . 40% have a Bachelor's Degree or higher.