Love Sidewalks/Hate Special Assessments

Wisconsin Statutes prescribe the procedures by which cities must follow to specially assess property for local improvements. The Wisconsin Supreme Court, discussing special assessment procedures, has stated that "[t]he power of a municipality to levy an assessment against a private owner is one which exists by right of statute, and the restrictions of the statute must be met if the assessment is to be deemed valid." Elaborating on this point, the court has further declared that "[a] special assessment, to be valid, must be levied pursuant to and in strict compliance with the statutory powers of a municipality." Municipal statutory powers to impose special assessments include both the complete procedure set forth in Wis. Stats. § 66.0703 and the power to adopt an ordinance setting forth a local special assessment procedure under Wis. Stats. § 66.0701. Chief among the requisite procedures are notice and hearing. Failure to comply with mandated procedures may result in the voidance of the special assessment.
The Council is being asked to pass the preliminary resolution that establishes the 2012 sidewalk project area as Stony Road and Plainview Terrace. This resolution authorizes staff to start the plans and develop estimated assessments.
For sidewalk projects, the Public Works Board conducts preliminary public hearings to discuss the project and the proposed special assessments. All affected property owners are notified by mail of the public hearings. The notice includes a brief description of the project and an estimate of the total cost. At the preliminary public hearing, the Board will hear all interested persons regarding the proposed assessments and will consider all written objections and statements before the final plans are prepared for the City Council.
The Board decides whether or not to recommend the proposed assessment to the City Council. It then goes to the City Council for public hearing and Council action in accordance with Wis. Stats. § 66.0703.
This Resolution is the actual start of the process. Staff will use this resolution as authorization to start preparing a set of design plans for comment at the final resolution public hearing.

The Big War

The big war starts this weekend. I'm going hunting.

Class War

Wider than ever.

New Perspective

I became a City Manager because I wanted to make sure that government was doing what I thought it should be doing. Wow, twenty five year's later my perspective has changed. I have adapted to my environment and discovered that there was more than just me that had to be considered.
The first five years on the job were spent learning how to get things done. Government spends as much time slowing the process down as the private sector spends speeding them up. The budget, notices, permits and meetings take time - a lot of time and the processes aren't necessarily intuitive from the cost effective point of view. For some reason, every person in the city thinks they should be notified and given an opportunity to comment.
The project priority system and financing don't function on a direct revenue generation system. Even though you know that the street floods because of inadequate storm sewer and destroys public and private property does not mean the project will be done because it affects a limited number of members within the community and the taxes raised don't have to be spent on the problem.
Fortunately, I had some mentors who were willing to help.
The next five years are about assessing what went right and figuring out how much was screwed up the first five years and fixing the problems. This involves trying to bring the organization along with you after the first five years. You also begin to understand the other players in your environment and how to effectively interact with them.
Now I'm settling in and starting to become effective and then I take another job. But, now I have certain skills that make this new job easier and the most important is the desire to continue learning.

Resistant?

"Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better."
- King Whitney Jr

Had a staff meeting yesterday regarding the proposed changes for 2012. The meeting went pretty well, but there are some that don't like the idea of computerized time clocks, tablets for recording daily activities or the need for an email address. I thought that everyone already had an email address.
The days of getting called to the job site, fixing just enough of the problem to get it to work and heading back to the shop are over. Most of the city's staff are good critical problem solvers, but now they have to record the activity for further evaluation. I have provided the daily report form to start the process.

Now Perform

So, we’ve cut our management staff pretty substantially for a small city. We have also eliminated two street department laborers positions. With aging streets and sidewalks that need to be maintained, a library and a parks operation facility that need to be built, fixed and/or adequately staffed and residents’ safety that must be insured, how can we strive to provide quality municipal services?
I want our citizens to understand that the City values the quality of the existing systems and how well maintained systems maintain our quality of life.
The city is going to have to focus on improving processes to maintain all the existing services or end up going through prioritizing essential functions. The recreation, parks and forestry departments add to our city, but are not essential functions and in some ways duplicate similar services provided by other organizations. Police, fire and streets are still functions the city should perform.
We have to stop and evaluate our operations and make some of these decisions.

New Budget Year

I know that you can’t manage it if you can’t measure it. So, what should we be measuring and why? We can generate policy, even if it is generally extrapolation. The level of planning and budgeting is quite extensive and at the end of the period we have provided the required outcomes. We have always been an organization that is result focused and do a good job of achieving the outcome. All our work effort has gone into the achievement of the outcome and no one has taken the time to measure inputs along the way. The output or workload data is generally available and needs the input data to generate performance indicators.

Without measurement, we cannot fully evaluate the outcome. We were probably effective from our perspective, but what about from the perspective of the Council, taxpayer or utilizer? Their satisfaction with the outcome is the real measure of effectiveness. It is standard that driver satisfaction relates to the smoothness of the pavement. So, if when filling potholes, you create a bump instead of a hole, are you effective? I know that you think you’ve been effective because the pothole is filled.

Was the process efficient and is the method use to make the decision intuitive of non-intuitive? I want to know the level of input compared to the value of the outputs. We are always busy, with measurement and evaluation we might be able to design process improvements and maybe we could produce more with less. Here we need to be able to measure efficiency, not workload or
utilizer satisfaction.

We are going to have to improve our efficiency or work a lot of hours because there are less of us then before with more outcomes expected.

Up From The Grave

Well, Addy is once again experiencing the cold Wisconsin wind in her bones.
http://lakemillsleaderonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=176&ArticleID=5734

Legal Note

Settlement of a lawsuit “with prejudice” bars a second action based on similar allegations involving the same parties.
Yeah!