Looking Forward

Last week we looked at what was accomplished in the City in 2017. Generally speaking it would be fair to say

• We have money in the bank, few debts, and no major lawsuits, which is something few cities can claim.
• We are doing more now than has ever been done in the past.
• We are handling more resident requests than ever before.
• We are getting these things done despite changes in key personnel, an active campaign to recall Councilman Hamilton, and a substantial increase in population.
• Yet the quality of what we are doing needs a lot of improvement, from the RFP process to staff reports.
• Even while government rolls forward, our ability to pursue new initiatives is seriously limited.
• As a result, we are wasting time, energy, and money, and we are not well positioned to enter 2018 with a good sense of direction.

How can we improve?

Fewer Initiatives

Given our poor track record, we need to stop our aggressive pursuit of new initiatives and go back to basics. I am very disappointed to make this recommendation, but the proof is in front of us (Click Here).

Better Quality

It’s hard to believe that such well-paid staff produces such poor reports. Some of the reports coming to the Council wouldn’t survive senior high school civics classes. On occasion we get a well done report, but it’s a rarity.

Council can’t make good decisions when we have poor reports in front of us. If we are incapable of producing consistently high quality reports, then we need a quality assurance person who can oversee this critical process.

Better Direction

There is a disconnect between what the Council is asking for and what we receive. There are several reasons for this

• The Council isn’t giving the best direction. This is partially caused by the poor manner in which Council meetings are conducted, and anyone who’s attended a meeting knows what I’m talking about. Between substitute motions and substitute/substitute motions, the endless prattle by some Council members who remind me of Shakespeare’s admonition “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing”, and the inability of some members to understand what’s on the table, by the time we come to voting on an issue, we are not producing the best motions. Better meetings, less prattle, and Council members doing their homework will help the Council make better decisions and give better direction.
• Staff rarely clarifies what the Council is asking for. Without clarification, staff goes off and addresses a problem which may not be the central issue: it may not even be the right issue. I know that staff like to defer to Council, but there is a time and place for deference, and getting proper direction is not that place. Staff needs to challenge the Council in a more constructive manner, especially when it comes to projects that are going to involve time, energy, and money.

Priorities

We are working in a “Wack-a-Mole” philosophy with no guidance to direct our activities. The “strategic plan” we have on record is pathetic, but even more pathetic is the strategic planning workshop we held to correct the plan we have. Thus we are like a boat at sea without a rudder. A strong Mayor might have helped, but we haven’t had that in years. We need to finish the strategic plan and establish priorities, but given our past accomplishment I am dubious about our ability to do this. Nonetheless it must be done and be done well.

Data Driven

One of the big differences between (city) government and the private sector is the reliance on data. If you run a business, the profit and loss statement gives excellent guidance to what you’re doing right or wrong. That’s because you have to “earn” your income. The city doesn’t “earn” its income. The government forces us to pay sales tax, real estate taxes, hotel taxes, and every other tax you can think of, and this is the income they get. But none of this is based on their performance. The City of Lake Forest will get $40,000,000 revenue next year whether we do a good job or not. That’s a big problem.

The only way to address this problem is to develop KPIs (key performance indicators) and gather as much data as we can to evaluate what we are doing. But this means that the Council too has got to be committed to looking at the data and making decisions based on the data. Too often political considerations come into play when making Council decisions (Witness the recent district transition decisions that ignored the data and selected districts based on where Council members lived instead of where we did the least harm to breaking up communities of interest - Click Here).

More Review

But KPIs alone will not solve the problems we confront. Annually reviewing some meagre KPIs is not the best way to run an organization. We need to produce meaningful KPIs and we need to monitor them on a monthly basis, setting aside a portion of the Council meeting for a review of all our major projects.

Look what happened with the Public Education Officer in animal control. We learned after the project had been in place for 3 months that they had achieved virtually nothing, and spent $18,000. Had we been on top of this on a monthly basis we would have caught the problem earlier.

Here’s another example. Only now we are learning that the Police have been putting officers on overtime since Dec 1, doing what they always did with regard to parking issues, which is basically very little. Almost all of our parking enforcement goes into tagging people for expired plates, but having expired plates has nothing to do with our parking problems in the city. So once more we are spending money and achieving nothing.

SUMMARY

Here are some suggestions to improve our performance.

• Let’s delay all new initiatives until we do a better job with the basics. That means better quality reports, better KPIs, and better review of KPIs, starting with monthly Council sessions devoted to assessing where we are.
• Let’s improve our Council direction. That means less prattle by Council members, better running of meetings, and more precise motions. And where we fail, staff needs to step up and keep us on track.
• Let’s finish up setting priorities so we can make better decisions on how we allocate resources.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook. His twitter handle is @DrJimGardner. His comments are not meant to reflect official City Policy.

Dr. Gardner has office hours every Tuesday from 4 pm to 6 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a mini town meeting every quarter. The next meeting will be Thursday Feb 15 at 7 pm at the Beach and Tennis Club.