Workshop planned to discuss city’s future

Instead of a workshop for “brainstorming short term and long term goals” for the city, the commission should simply look to the City Manager’s submission of the five year capital program that was supposed to be submitted to them by September 30th. That was the time to brainstorm goals for this year and the next 5 years.

The city’s charter states:

Section 6.11. Capital Program.
(a) Submission to City Commission. The City Manager shall prepare and submit to the City Commission a five year capital program no later than the final date for submission of the budget.
(b) Contents. The capital program shall include:
(1) A clear general summary of its contents;
(2) A list of all capital improvements and other capital expenditures which are proposed to be undertaken during the five fiscal years next ensuing with appropriate supporting information as to the necessity of each;
(3) Cost estimates and recommended time schedules for each improvement or other capital expenditure;
(4) Method of financing, upon which each expenditure is to be reliant; and
(5) The estimated annual cost of operating and maintaining the facilities to be constructed or acquired.

“The above shall be revised and extended each year with regard to capital improvements still pending or in process of construction or acquisition.”

Why didn’t the commission look at the capital program’s five-year plan when they evaluated the CM, BEFORE they gave him a $10,000 raise? They gave him a raise of taxpayers money without knowing what direction the city was taking this year and the next five years, as required by his job description.

This is not a newsworthy story on its face. What is newsworthy is this admission by the entire city commission that, 1) they don’t know the job description of the CM and on what basis they are to evaluate him; 2) they don’t know what the city charter requires of them; 3) they have no clue what they are doing; and, 4) they have no leadership whatever in city hall. The mayor, nearly two years after being re-elected, is finally getting around to addressing the immediate and long-term plans of the city. Clearly, up to now, settling his personal vendettas was his priority.

This city commission and administration is failing this city. Miserably. The time for this workshop was prior to September 30, 2012, when the capital program is due and this fiscal year’s budget was passed. But this is what you can expect from a commission who awards the CM a $40,000+/year assistant and a $10,000 raise without a comprehensive plan in place. A commission who borrows $3,000,000 in November and starts the interest running for street repairs that won’t start until the Spring, without knowing which streets will be repaired, who will repair them and at what cost.

This is the type of mismanagement that has gotten this city in the state its’ in. The commission doesn’t need a workshop, it needs a new CM. The citizens don’t need a workshop, we need a new commission.

San Benito has no future. San Benito is the city that does not work for a living. Eighty percent of the population
is on welfare…human parasites…human cockroaches. For a central busisness district to flourish, the city has
to have people that WORK FOR A LIVING.

In graduate school I learned that a standard performance measurement cliché says:

“what gets measured gets done,” “ if you don’t measure results, you can’t tell success from failure and thus you can’t claim or reward success or avoid unintentionally rewarding failure,” “ if you can’t recognize success, you can’t learn from it; if you can’t recognize failure, you can’t correct it,” “if you can’t measure it, you can neither manage it nor improve it,”

“Performance measures” must be “strategic and quantifiable” and “tied to each goal or objective.”

“Goals and objectives by themselves are not performance measures.”

The City Commission should define the city manager’s mission and establish measurable goals for achieving desirable results for the taxpayers who fund the city.
City government needs to be “accountable to the “taxpayers”” about what return is provided on their investment in the city. Financial and/or spending reports report on the investment of city funds and the city should communicate the return on that investment through this “measureable performance measures.”

Bottom line, each goal or objective identified must have a “strategic and measureable performance measure” tied to it. It is thru these performance measurements that makes “accountability” possible. These performance measures provide the evidence to the credible question:

Is the City of San Benito and it’s taxpayers better off today than the last performance review?.