So who is our sponsor? I am. And you are. We few, we 3000, are the captains of this ship. We are the sole boosters, and the sole beneficiaries, of this neighborhood and everything it has to offer.
But since we all have day jobs, or some other things to do, and don't necessarily want to cut the grass, change the oil, write out the checks to pay the bills, or make minor decisions, (or we don't know how), we hire help. We get a gardener, or a maid, or a mechanic, who does what we want them to do.
The help we hire directly are the Commissioners. We interview them for the job, to the extent any of us wants to, and we turn them loose on the work to be done. But it's more of a job than they can do, either, so they hire people to help them. The main person they hire is the Village Manager. She, in turn, hires others, who actually sweat. That's our Public Works staff, our Police, our Recreation staff, and clerks and office workers.
The Commissioners are of attenuated importance, because they don't do the direct work. The ones who sweat are of attenuated importance, because they don't make decisions. The person in all of this who is very important is the Manager. At this moment in our history, that person is Ana Garcia.
Ana is a bit of a lightning rod. It's partly the position she holds, and partly that it's her style to put herself "out there." She takes a lot of heat for her position, and for her decisions. Her predecessor, our first Manager, Frank Spence, used to say the job of municipal manager required the wearing of asbestos underwear. Ana wears them, too.
One component of feedback Ana gets from the Commission is whether she is trying hard enough to keep expenses down. There is always someone who thinks they could be less than they are. AJ Gallo, a resident in attendance at last night's final budget hearing, announced that having looked at some version of the budget, he could easily find "$15,000" of unnecessary expenses. I don't know what Mr Gallo did for a living before he retired, but he was confident and cavalier about his conclusions about the budget, which he apparently considered inflated. Funny enough, Ana Garcia, a profession municipal manager, and Charlie Smith, a professional accountant with abundant municipal experience, could not quite find $12,500 in things they could cut.
I don't quarrel entirely with Mr Gallo. I'm sure he could find $15,000 in things that seem to him like waste. If I bothered, I might be able to find $15,000, too. And it might be a different $15K. So that's $30K between us. If we get enough "experts," like me and Mr Gallo, maybe we can reduce the budget to next to nothing.
But Mr Gallo might only be thinking of what seems unimportant to him. And I might focus on what's unimportant to me. Or some pandering, populist Commissioner might only want low taxes, no matter what gets cut. The heavy lifting, in terms of real and responsible balance, comes from Ana.
Ana describes herself as conservative, "personally and professionally." That's fine and nice to know, but she has to preserve this Village. We don't need her to be "conservative," or cheap, or competitive, or a daredevil. We need her to be careful and responsible. We need her to be conscientious and creative. We need her to know how to negotiate legal and financial challenges. We need her to have perspective and know how to take a long and broad view. And boy, is she all of that. We need to tell her generally what's important to us as a Village, and let her do what we hire her to do. We tell her what we want, and she tells us what it will cost. If we can't afford it, we tell her that, and she recalculates, and tells us what we can have for what we're willing to pay. If she's doing her job well, she'll also tell us what it will "cost" not to spend money on one thing or another.
So I'm good with Ana. I haven't agreed with everything she's done, but I don't agree with everything anyone does, nor does anyone else I know. I'm just looking at the big picture, and I believe Ana is, too.
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