Reply from Seth Grimes

Seth wrote this as a comment on my last post. I think it deserves it's own posting up front.

Where are the Porter S'porters? How about writing an entry?

--Gilbert

From Seth Grimes (or someone claiming to be him):

I'll respond to a few points --

1) "He must get some regular exercise, and judging from his tan, he gets it outdoors." I spent five hours standing out in the sun, handing out leaflets and talking to folks, at the Folk Festival and at the Street Festival. I spent a couple of hours out at the Farmers' Market one Sunday, and then I've spent dozens of hours canvassing door-to-door. Let me recommend all this as the way to achieve a tan and to lose a bit of weight.

2) I'm not getting my message across. "Seth's clipped descriptions of how he's going to whip the city staff into shape and change the managerial style of city hall." The second part's my message but not the first part. It's council procedures that I plan to whip into shape. I'd like to create new city policies -- I'd like to create an environment policy and a development policy to replace our current haphazard, reactive approaches -- and I'd like to improve the sloppy execution (call it policy if you wish) in our major projects. These changes will affect staff, but they will be for City Manager Barb Matthews to implement, for her to do any "whipping into shape" she sees as necessary.

The only references I've made to staff that I can think of are a) we should have hired a professional construction project manager for the Community Center and we should consider hiring a facilty/marketing manager for the CC now that it's about to open, and b) we should hire additional police officers to get our force up to full, authorized strength, possibly involving the city's human resources manager in recruiting.

But more important, 'For instance, Seth makes much of the city paying "$327,000 more than the $423,000 budgeted for legal services" for a 4 year period as an example of mismanagement and profligate spending.' No, THAT'S NOT IT AT ALL. Profligate spending isn't my point, UNCONTROLLED spending is. This overspending/underbudgeting occurred for five years running (counting last fiscal year), and Mayor Porter implicitly admits that she didn't see (or care about) the PATTERN of underbudgeting, which should have been fixed after 2-3 years of this, whether by raising the budgets or cutting spending is another discussion. In fact, I and the Sustainable Takoma folks who brought light to this problem had a positive effect: the city is now no longer using attorneys for certain administrative functions, which is saving the city money.

It's difficult to get nuance across and regardless people hear what they want, what they're predisposed to hear, and if they're predisposed to hear that someone's a "gadfly" (implying an intention to sting rather than to lend a hand), then they'll wrongly hear a message of non-contributing criticism.

Seth