"A Walk in the Park"

So, once again, we're getting ready to hire a (real) manager.  It will be our sixth time since 2006.  The non-Commissioner resident committee has been seated, it's had its organizational meeting, and the first meeting at which applications (25, as of last week) will be discussed will be on Friday, September 11, at 6:30 PM.  As far as I know, this is a public meeting, and anyone can watch and listen with Zoom.

For a brief recap (see, I didn't say recapitulation, because I'm keeping this brief), our first manager was a place-holder, while we got our sea legs, manager-wise.  He was not great, and not terrible, and we didn't know how to use a manager.  We figured it out.  Our next three managers were excellent.  The next was a disaster, because he was a ghost manager, and it was really Tracy Truppman, who knew nothing about municipal management, who was running the Village.  Between managers, we had interim managers, as we do now, and two were perfectly adequate (the company we hired between manager #1 and manager #2, and later, Maria Camara twice).  The rest have been terrible.

One subject that has been discussed is manager compensation.  Some of us tell ourselves we have to pay more than we do, if we want top flight management.  And I suggest we stop the conversation for a few minutes, and think about that.  Do we want top flight management?  Do we need top flight management?

In my opinion, managing Biscayne Park, Florida, is a relatively easy gig.  A theory I have propounded before, and to which I continue to adhere, is that managing Biscayne Park is something a minimally trained municipal manager (I've conceptualized it as someone who just graduated from municipal management school, if there is such a thing) could do.  Or, as has happened to us most of the time, it's something a talented and ambitious person with related municipal management skills could do to strengthen a resume, and to show what s/he's got, on the way to that big job s/he has her/his eye on.  The one that pays the much bigger bucks than we do.  Or than we really could.  We give them (the kid out of school, or the person who was never before a full manager) a chance, they give us great service that they can parlay into something better for themselves, and everyone's happy.  And then, we find the next kid, or the next person who has something to prove.

We're sort of a one zone operation.  We're all residential, except our municipal buildings (log cabin, public works building, administration building, and recreation property) and the church.   The church almost gave up the ghost several years ago, but it got itself resurrected.  (Hmm, maybe I'm missing something here.)  But all the rest is 1200 houses, the vast majority of which are single-family.  Some of the people who live in those houses also work in their houses (I do), but there really isn't a commercial component per se.  And there are the municipal properties.  And a bunch of medians.

The work of a manager is mostly paperwork, and keeping everything functioning.  We don't really have big ambitions.  We came close twice, when we wanted to annex some nearby unincorporated county.  But we failed, first because one Commission refused to apply, and then because the next Commission did apply, but the county refused to consider our application.  I guess outsourcing the rest of sanitation (we had already outsourced recycling years before) was a kind of ambition.  It was our then manager's idea, it seemed to many of us like a very good idea, and we did it.  It helped us in several ways, and made some of us unhappy.  But we never undid it.  And we could have.  We could have the ambition of improving our medians, but we have persistently not entertained that possible ambition.

Managing here is relatively easy, especially if the Commission, and the manager, don't want to change anything.  It's been done very well three times for the salary that some of us say can't attract a good manager.  So, the theory is that we can't do something, and the reality is that we have done it repeatedly.

We don't have to pay a lot.  We don't have to have "champagne taste on a beer budget."  And if we try to do that, all we'll do is pay more for what we already have, which will deprive us of money we could spend on things we don't have, like nice medians, better drainage, streets in good repair, better lighting, solar panels, and more public art.

So I say let's ratchet ourselves down a bit, and function like the modest community we are.  It's just not that complicated.