The Morgan Hill Times is undertaking a new “Accountability in Community Leadership Project” in 2007. The newspaper is implementing the project by capturing the goals of community leaders and having its readers, members of its editorial board and elected officials grade goal accomplishment.
The Times has published the first report card for the Morgan Hill Unified School District Board of Education and is about to release results for the Morgan Hill City Council.
I want to pass along my thoughts to the Times and its readers about the project in general, how it is being implemented and how I would rate the project and our performance. The views expressed are solely my own and not meant to represent the city.
First, I think that an overriding objective of “improving Morgan Hill” is shared by the Times, its readers and everyone at the city, elected officials and staff. I would very much like to believe that the Times’ primary motivation for the project is to improve our community. And getting citizens engaged in a process that will lead to improvement is a definite positive, the city certainly values as much citizen input as possible. So I applaud the Times for engaging citizens for the purpose of improving our community.
The situation of the newspaper, the citizens and the city having a common objective seems like a natural basis for collaboration and consensus. But merely providing report-card grades, based primarily on council time-frame goals and brief status summaries of them is neither collaboration nor true engagement/involvement. Like in school, grades should help to focus on areas needing improvement. I have asked myself what I will do differently based on the grades given, and I can not come up with anything. I will know the grade, but there is no impact, so how does that help improve anything?
When we set our 2007 goals at our annual council retreat in January, we concentrated our efforts on establishing checkpoint dates that would move us toward improving Morgan Hill in certain areas. These included downtown vitality, police and fire service levels, financial stability and economic development among others. Again, the goals set were checkpoint dates, not final completion/implementation of any specific project.
The goals we set work very well to assure that we are on track and making progress in the areas identified, but are not at all conducive to “grading.” I guess they are really of a binary nature, so the only grading possible is “pass” or “fail.” I believe we “pass” all of our goals by making the target date with perhaps one exception in the area of council reporting. The goal of producing quarterly written reports on the status of council advisory committee workplans can’t be implemented until we’ve adopted those plans, and that hasn’t happened yet, so perhaps we get an “incomplete” there.
Our successes are numerous. We stuck to the Sustainable Budget Strategy policies, producing a 2007-08 budget with a significant projected surplus. We are actively discussing economic development and plan a fall workshop. We’ve revised the development impact-fee system. The council’s Public Safety and Community Services Committee produced a report on what was needed to maintain adequate public safety service levels and a July council workshop is planned to further explore the city’s options. We’ve begun negotiations in earnest with downtown property owners, including the owner of the Granada Theater, to expedite vitalization efforts.
Turning it around, my assessment of the Morgan Hill Times Accountability Project is “needs improvement.” I would award the Morgan Hill Times an “A” for effort for attempting to engage its readers in a process to improve our community. But I can’t give the newspaper a very good grade on the project implementation, since I don’t think the outcome of the “report cards” will make any meaningful contribution toward community improvement.
I would very much like to work with the Times and its editorial board on improving the project so it can really “make a difference” by allowing its readers to provide meaningful input to the city. Rather than grading our goals, I would like to develop an approach that evaluates tradeoffs in how we reach our objectives, perhaps some sort of a survey form to be published periodically. It can certainly be related to our goals, but in a more meaningful way.
Whatever process we can mutually develop, I would definitely like to see it be a cooperative and collaborative approach. The Times, its readers and the city all are united in the common objective of making Morgan Hill even better than it is today. We need to work as a team to make it happen. I look forward to the opportunity to do so.
Steve Tate was elected mayor of Morgan Hill last November at the conclusion of his second
four-year term on the City Council. He is a longtime Morgan Hill resident and a retired IBM manager. Reach him at
st*******@ch*****.net
.
