Unless you having been living under a rock the past couple of weeks, it was pretty obvious the TenHaken administration screwed the pooch on communicating to residents the city’s roll in storm cleanup. The ED board asked some of the same things I was wondering;
When the 2018 mayoral race came down to the choice between a reporter and public policy advocate on the one hand, and the CEO of a successful digital marketing agency on the other, it was reasonable for Sioux Falls citizens to expect an era of clear communication from City Hall no matter the victor.
Now that Paul TenHaken earned the office and has faced his first significant crisis, with tornado and flood damage putting leadership at a premium, the verdict on communication is somewhat muddled.
How do you run a supposed successful internet marketing company and not know anything about communicating and messaging? I have argued with people it is because PTH hired really smart people, but didn’t really learn anything from his employees. There have numerous studies and books written on how attractive, tall, people are more successful simply because they are attractive and tall. It also goes back to who you know. I told someone once that if Kristi Noem looked like Rosie O’Donnell she wouldn’t even been able to be elected dog catcher. What we are witnessing is highly attractive people with extremely low IQ’s ruling us. We have become a society obsessed with image. This is why PTH and Noemless wear trucker hats, as a political prop to show they are getting their hands dirty. I’m not so easily fooled, and neither is the ED board;
Messaging from the city regarding cleanup efforts in the tornadoes’ aftermath, while equally swift, was less coherent. A series of staggered press releases as to which debris and branches the city would remove – and which tasks would be the responsibility of property owners – seemed like a work in progress rather than a well-articulated rollout. The disagreement of public officials and citizens on social media regarding how much city government should be doing further eroded clarity.
Getting out in front of issues with unambiguous information goes a long way toward mitigating uncertainty and unhappiness among those a government serves. Homeowners want to know exactly where things stand as they assess timber-lined lawns and twisted branches; telling them that volunteer forces may (or may not) be coming to help does not help them rest easy.
Cameraman Bruce brought this up after a BNSF train derailed under the viaduct missing one of the pylons by a couple of feet. What would have happened if it did hit the pylon? What if it was hazardous materials like ethanol or fertilizers instead of corn? We were told that the city has a ‘plan’. But apparently we saw the city really doesn’t have a plan when it comes to tornado cleanup. You would think a seasoned city director like Mark Cotter would have been able to pull out a 3-Ring binder out of his desk at about 11:45 that night and said, “Here’s our plan Paul, I recommend we follow it.” Instead PTH turned this into a volunteer effort like we were raising a Huetterite Barn.
And it wasn’t like an atomic bomb dropped on us, it was a tornado, something we were actually warned about days in advance could happen that night. Where was the 3-Ring binder? Apparently it was replaced with a Dutch Mafia Bible.
The ED board didn’t finish at storm cleanup, they brought up budgeting for the Cult Officer, and as several friends and I have pointed out after Jen Holsen’s rant about the position, doesn’t it look like PTH is throwing his HR department and directors under the bus by saying they are NOT doing their job?
TenHaken argued that his private sector experience has shown him that city HR isn’t up to addressing employee culture because they’re too busy with payroll and interviews to improve the work environment across departments. If so, that could be a reason to evaluate and overhaul an ineffective department – or some may call it a compelling case for creating the new position. But the fact it took a tiebreaking vote to move the issue forward is proof there was more clarification and communication needed.
And finally, the ED board addresses that age old question, can government be run like a business?
Relevant questions have arisen from these disparate situations: Can all private sector initiatives can be usefully mapped onto running a municipal government? How much budgetary muscle should city leaders use in responding to natural disasters, or should they abdicate to volunteers or partnerships? How much should city government organizationally be mimicking the private sector?
No, because business and government have different objectives. But there is one thing we learned that helps us to understand why both are NOT the same, (good) businesses actually have prepared plans when disasters strike, because if they don’t, they go out of business. Government officials just hide in their garage and hope the problem goes away.