Thursday, June 28, 2007
In early May, after more than 28 years of continuous service with Santa Barbara County, I left my “dream job” because I was no longer allowed to provide the levels of superior public service and regard for the environment that were my reasons for working there in the first place. Today’s county workers are assigned tasks that are tied to “quantifiable performance measures” that have little or nothing to do with providing excellent public service and meaningful environmental stewardship, but rather have much to do with the ever-shifting whims of individual elected officials and appointed managers. So, very reluctantly and regretfully, I left.
I was raised with strong public service and environmental ethics and, since high school, had a life goal of a career that served the broadest possible community while providing a modest living. I was privileged to achieve this goal in January 1979, when I started as an extra-help environmental specialist with the county’s former Department of Environmental Resources, and went on to become a long-range planner. There was one overarching reason for this transition from environmental analyst to planner: Better long-term planning can prevent many environmental problems, and reduce the need to perform costly environmental impact reports and band-aid remediation.
I saw and weathered many transitions of political and professional power over those 28-plus years, but some of the most recent changes finally led me to throw in the towel. Some of the county’s top “leaders” demonstrate extraordinary blends of arrogance, malice, duplicity, ignorance, and careless disregard for the unintended consequences of their actions and failures to act. One result has been a tragic exodus of talent and experience from the ranks of county employees; the past three or so years have been miserable for many people throughout the county’s rank and file.
In Planning and Development (P&D) alone, more than 120 (yes, one hundred and twenty) planners have gone over the wall since December 2000, when some among us started keeping track of farewell messages; people who simply left without written goodbyes aren’t included on this roster. I’m number 121 on the list. These departures, to be sure, have been for various reasons, including some tragically personal ones, but there are a few recurring themes:
• Plummeting morale, which is directly traceable to professional and personal disrespect and outright hostility from executive management, elected and appointed officials, and some of the most vocal members of the public; diminishment of professional responsibilities and growth opportunities for non-management staff; top-down directive and autocratic management with very little feedback from non-management staff, including recriminations against those who dare to speak out against the madness; and constantly shifting priorities and task assignments, killing the ability to get anything done, especially in the realm of long-range planning;
• Much better opportunities with other public agencies, private firms, and personal ventures;
• And, of course, the high cost of housing compared with salaries and benefits.
The last sad fact, of course, affects everyone who works for a living and many who don’t, an issue which merits its own future column. Here and now, I want to concentrate on a few more parochial matters.
One of the more intensely personal and infuriating misadventures in “professional management” began about two years ago, in June 2005, during the Board of Supervisors’ annual week of budget hearings for the coming fiscal year. Out of the clear blue, on Wednesday afternoon, Supervisor Brooks Firestone put forth the proposition that P&D’s comprehensive planning division should be pruned from P&D and grafted onto the County Executive Office (CEO). On Friday morning, it was a done deal.
A month later, at least 28 staff members of comprehensive planning and P&D’s energy division packed up and exchanged places, swapping our respective offices and destroying at least two weeks’ productivity for all concerned. Do some math — the monetary cost alone should stagger the taxpayers’ and fee-payers’ imaginations, and please don’t forget that county employees are taxpayers too. There were 14 good souls in comprehensive planning at the beginning of that fateful summer of 2005; only four of them remain today. Others have come and gone over the past two years.
The main expressed intent of this reorganization, both structurally and physically, was to allow comprehensive planning to focus on long-range planning projects, and for the permit processing divisions to focus on process improvements. The latter generally, though not exclusively, means approving development applications faster and with less public and professional scrutiny.
A little shy of two years later, comprehensive planning — now known as long range planning — was reorganized back into P&D, although the functional connections will take some time to regenerate. I believe this reattachment was the major doing of P&D’s current contract director, John Baker, although he demurred on confirming this during my exit interview with him in early May. At the risk of making him a target, I believe Mr. Baker is a competent and decent person who’s trying hard to do some very good things, but he’s fighting an uphill battle against a vindictive, over-controlling, and oppressive executive cadre. However, like an earlier director, Al Reynolds, he’s a former Navy hand who knows basic right from wrong and can fend well for himself and his people.
Let me be clear on something else: I don’t think Supervisor Firestone, County Executive Mike Brown, Deputy CEO Ron Cortez, et al are necessarily bad persons, but they have caused and continue to cause some very bad things to happen. They are members of a class of elite and self-important executives who believe they know what’s best and can manage any organization under any circumstances, whether or not they have prior experience carrying out that organization’s core business. In my lifelong experience, these types of executives usually don’t have such superior abilities, but rather greatly muck up things they don’t fully understand, and then move on to muck up something else, somewhere else. Attempts to help them understand the functions that they manage often are met with abuse and punishment for daring to question their self-believed omnipotence.
These types of problems and issues extend well beyond P&D and, indeed, well beyond the county government. Please try this: Talk with any friend or neighbor who works, or recently used to work, for Santa Barbara County; you’ll get varied opinions and perspectives, but I’ll bet that most of them generally agree with my assessments.
If this is how a “professionally managed organization” looks and functions, then perhaps Santa Barbara County should consider semi-pro status. Can we afford otherwise?