Issues: Micromanagement

Some members of Council think that the city is run by the Council, not the people who actually are hired to do the job. This leads them to believe they can and should micromanage city operations.

 

The role of Council is simple. Council sets policies for the city to follow. It establishes goals for the city to work toward. It sets budgets and establishes taxation to give staff the resources they need to achieve those goals. It hires and fires the city administrator and city attorney.

 

That's it. Nothing more. Council is expressly prohibited by section 2.09 of the charter from interfering in the operations of the city or in hiring and firing decisions. It can express its opinions. That is the extent of its power.

 

Council member Britney Kawecki thinks that she's smarter than the rest of Council and the staff who is responsible for getting the actual work done according to policies Council has set. She constantly compares Fairmont to other southern Minnesota cities such as New Ulm or Waseca and demands that we run Fairmont the same way, without considering that there may well be reasons that we do things differently here.

 

In addition, she refuses to recognize that equipment has a useful life, and when it is kept beyond that life, the risk of catastrohic breakdown rises dramatically. Just this year, she tried to stop the city from replacing a 1984 road grader and a 1993 dump truck, both well beyond their useful life and for which parts are increasingly hard to obtain. She justfies this by trying to substitute her expertise for that of the people who actually do the work.

 

Recently, the city has been working to replace the manager of the city's liquor store after the previous manager retired. A candidate from Mankato was selected and offered the position. This outraged some members of the community, and mayoral candidate Todd Smith coordinated a massive pressure campaign against that candidate, resulting in his withdrawal from consideration.

 

Council member Randy Lubenow saw an opportunity to burnish his campaign for re-election, and called a special Council meeting to grandstand over the issue. Never mind that, under the charter, Council has no role in the selection. Not only that, but Council has no right, under the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act, to gain access to the information that the staff used to make its decision.

 

The meeting was 30 minutes of Lubenow and Kawecki grandstanding over the fact that we did not hire the preferred internal candidate. I called the meeting a farce because that's exactly what it was. Lubenow said that he called it because he'd heard citizens' concerns. The right answer was not to waste everyone's time with a special meeting that could accomplish exactly nothing, but to explain to the citizens that Council has no role in the process and that staff chose the best candidate based on defined criteria.

 

One other note: Under Minnesota law, the city is expressly prohibited from requiring that a municipal employee live within the city limits, or even granting preference to candidates who do. There is a narrow exception for those who have a bonafide job requirement to be available within a specific time frame, such as emergency responders; even then, the requirement must be baed on response time and nothing else. The liquor store manager has no such job-related requirement.

 

Both of these issues point out an overall problem: micromanagement. Council should not be micromanaging the city's operations. Kawecki claims that she's not a micromanager. I have never met a micromanager who understands they are micromanaging.

 

Council needs to stay in its lane and let the experts the city hires to do the job actually get the job done. That's what responsible leaders do.