The State of the City speech Mayor Nickels should have delivered
Mayor Nickels' annual address missed the mark by failing to recognize the urgency and by not calling for sacrifices, beginning with hizzoner.
In the most challenging economic era Seattle has faced since Hoovervilles sprouted in the shadow of the Smith Tower, Mayor Nickels’ annual State of the City address was remarkable for its avoidance of the most pressing question: How do we manage the City in a way that gets us out in front of the economic cris1s instead of being caught in reaction mode?
The answer to that question offers the only hope we have for marshalling resources enough to meet the demand for basic human services as the situation worsens. As Seattleites who used to be "one paycheck away" from homelessness start needing emergency shelter, demand for services will soar. As parents become newly unemployed through no fault of their own, they will struggle to find a way to keep breakfast on the table. The numbers have already begun to spike up at area food banks.
The Mayor is right about one thing. In Seattle we pride ourselves on our sense of concern for each other — and yet in his address Nickels gave no details about how the city is preparing for the inevitable. One wonders if the captain has a steady hand on the tiller or is simply rearranging deck chairs. Behind the speech’s veil of PR spin and waves of oft-repeated statistics (More movie shoots than ever!), we have no way of knowing.
By the end of Mayor Nickels’ State of the City address one could only wonder: Does the Mayor realize that we’re just not that interested pothole statistics for the seventh time in a row?
Nickels has spent the bulk of his career — since age 19 — as a bureaucrat or a politician. This is no slight to his years of service. He has effectively avoided getting lost in the seas of lofty visions, but he also has missed opportunities in managing the city’s finances through this crisis. While he spoke of doing “more with less,” he gave no particular description how, precisely, he proposes to do so.
My personal perspective comes from the automotive and manufacturing industries, where business and management challenges abound. If there is one industry that can inform us about strategies to adopt or reject in a crisis, automotive is it. When truly frightening storms approach, far better to tack in the direction of Alan Mullaly at Ford than Rick Wagoner at General Motors.
In short, get the problems on the table, air out the data, let everyone see the picture, and then ask everyone to pitch in with solutions. Marshall resources early — and more than you think you may need. Don’t bury bad news; embrace it as an opportunity. The quickest route to your own demise is keeping information compartmentalized and revealing only part of the picture to some of the team.
With that approach to a crisis in mind, here’s what Mayor Nickels could have said in his speech that would have inspired greater confidence that he has the skills in-hand to navigate these waters:
“My fellow Seattle citizens, I’ve asked the nearly 700 city employees who, like me, make more than $100,000 per year to join with me in taking a voluntary 10 percent pay reduction for the rest of 2009. In addition, I ask those who are able to consider making an additional contribution of their salary to a local organization that addresses homelessness, hunger, or the concern of your choice that will aid our Seattle neighbors in need right now. Not everyone will be able to contribute in the same way, but these times will require all of us who love the things that make Seattle different to step up in every way we can.
“In addition, I have directed the heads of all City departments to recommend ways of immediate achieving cost savings, cost reductions, and new efficiencies so that we can direct those savings to vital human needs during this economic crises. We must end programs that aren’t working, adjust our expectations for automatic wage increases, and find creative ways to utilize our workforce to preserve jobs.
“Our new President spoke to this in his Inaugural Address and now is the time for all of us to act. Our goal as a city should be to double our ‘war chest’ for addressing homelessness, hunger, and basic needs before the year is done. For we will surely need it.
“Finally, we ask our City employees and our labor union partners to help lead us through the storm. We need to have the flexibility and creativity of our union workforce brought to bear on our challenges. If we are to find ways to truly get more done with less, our employees will lead us there. Therefore I am asking the leaders of each labor union Local with whom the City maintains a labor agreement to bring forward their proposals for finding new efficiency and generating savings we can put to our fundamental needs.
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Feb 19, 7:01 a.m. inappropriate
"...calling for sacrifices, beginning with hizzoner." I could get behind that. Do you think Qwest Field would be large enough to hold all the people who would want to watch the Mayor sacrificed?
Posted Thu, Feb 19, 7:31 a.m. inappropriate
So, are you announcing your candidacy for Mayor?
Art
Posted Thu, Feb 19, 12:12 p.m. inappropriate
It's more than "ending programs that are not working". The City's budget needs to be scrubbed for programs that are not essential when citizens are in a world of hurt. The city's TV channel is one example. It's working - perhaps too well. It has won national awards as the best public access channel. But it's gone beyond providing timely info on city government into pure entertainment. One only needs to compare it's 2009 budget ($3.4m, 18.25 FTEs) to the King County channel 2009 budget ($707K, 7 FTEs) to grasp the fact that there are opportunities for considerable paring to get back to a basic level of service.
Posted Thu, Feb 19, 1:18 p.m. inappropriate
lazy journalism... Facts are readily at hand if this author had bothered to even check the public record.
The fictionalized request to contribute to the needy, actually exists. Last year's city employees' Combined Charities payroll contribution program exceeded it's $1 million goal and nearly 15,000 hours pledged hours of volunteer time. City wide participation was 28% with some depts. at 100%. Just three years ago it was 6.4%.
As for voluntary pay cuts, nearly 90% of city employees are in unions, and a number of contracted city services (think solid waste collection) is also union. Wages and benefits for these workers are already indexed to economic factors. For example garbage rates will go up March 30 to coincide with 2 new city contracts kicking off. The previous ones were in place for 10 years. Garbage collection expenses is almost entirely labor and fuel which have risen much faster rate than the COLA index. So yea Allied and WM were taking in the shorts when gas was $4/gallon, and health care saw 35% increases annualy year after year.
Finally the fictionalized request to tighten belts by urging elimination of non-priorities and implementing efficiencies. That's exactly what City Council did in passing the budget last November... check the city's Finance Dept website for a dept by dept accounting. Even since then the news has become more grim with more spending cuts since the fourth qtr. B&O; and REET receipts are anticipated to be lower than expected even from November.
For example most city depts are funded thu the general fund, some like SCL and SPU are enterprise funded meaning rate payers make up most of their revenue. Then there's DPD which in part survives on fees paid by developers building new construction... with the slow down they're expected to lay off 35 FTE's.
So hizzoner's message may not have sounded sober enough for you, but a reporter (or his editor) should know enough to go beyond the tone of the message, and relate it to readily available facts. Because what he didn't emphasis was much more austere.
Posted Thu, Feb 19, 4:37 p.m. inappropriate
no, dwhiting, that's what you think the city is doing, and there are a considerable number of individuals who would re-write the cities budget with a very different agenda !
Posted Thu, Feb 19, 5:34 p.m. inappropriate
Mayor Nickels's tenure is a comedy of errors and incompetence. The recent snow debacle was only the most recent example of foolish floundering failure.
Posted Thu, Feb 19, 11:37 p.m. inappropriate
What about the unfunded transportation projects (I'm thinking Mercer Mess, and any of these silly streetcars?) Are these items atually on the budget? And if so why not delay them until the crisis is over? Yes there is a stimulus effect by doing the project, but does it offset the real suffering that we might see in the city? How do you balance out these vanity projects agaisnt homelessness and hunger?
Posted Fri, Feb 20, 8:05 a.m. inappropriate
Thank you for your comment and info, Mr. Whiting. The city's Combined Charities payroll contribution program does translate to real help for people in need and it was not my intent to diminish that good effort.
The point I had hoped to make in my opinion piece was that over and above whatever has been done up until now, the economic situation going forward is fairly likely to present many, many greater management challenges ahead. As a businessperson, it would have been more reassuring to hear the Mayor's State of the City address spend a great deal more attention on how to manage these upcoming challenges - in detail. Exactly because so many funding sources and cost reduction opportunities are constrained, I had hoped to hear about how we were 'casting aside old assumptions' and 'starting with a blank sheet of paper' wherever possible to get ahead of the expected collapsing revenues. And I was hoping to hear several concrete examples of that. That would have been bracing, refreshing talk that inspired confidence in the management of the problem - to my view.