Some Say You Get What You Pay For.

Two of our neighbors, in unconnected conversations with me (and one of them made the initial assertion during public comment in a Commission meeting), said the same thing: we can't expect a quality manager for the amount we pay.  One of our neighbors cited as proof that we have had "five managers/interim managers...in just [the past] five years."  Well, that was a manipulation in that five years ago, our manager was Heidi Siegel.  When she resigned, we briefly had Maria Camara as interim manager, followed promptly by Sharon Ragoonan.  So that's three, and it's because Heidi had lost the support of a majority of the Commission, which had nothing to do with the amount of compensation.  A short interim stint was necessary, and it was properly followed by Sharon, who would be our manager today if it were not for Tracy Truppman.  Tracy pushed Sharon out, and then hired Krishan Manners, who was hired because he would not be a good manager, and he was properly dismissed once Tracy was gone.  So none of this was a reflection of what we pay managers.  In fact, Sharon took a considerable salary reduction from her prior job to be our manager.  And Krishan was handed an unexplained bonus (of our money) by Tracy.

I'm not saying we don't pay low on the scale of municipal managers.  We do.  We're a tiny municipality with very limited resources, and we don't pay much for anything.  If anyone wants to argue that we have no business being an independent municipality, then that's a separate argument.  And it's been made, most prominently in the past several years by then Commissioner Bryan Cooper.  But since we haven't agreed with Bryan that we should fold up, and donate ourselves to the County, North Miami, or, according to the quirks of Bryan's fantasy life, Miami Shores, then we still have to do the best we can with what we have.  One of the things we do is find a way to get what we want, like a manager, without paying top dollar.  Or even the common going rate.

We haven't had professional management for very long.  Say what you want about the wisdom, or lack of it, of our way of managing ourselves, but before 2006, each department was "managed" by a Commissioner, who did not necessarily know anything about managing anything.  They were elected, because they charmed their neighbors, not because they were in any sense vetted to have proper managerial qualifications.  Or even abilities.  Is this why Ana Garcia's first task was to lop off large amounts of fat from our public works department, and why the log cabin had to be extensively, and expensively, renovated after many decades of deterioration due to being ignored?  Is it why our version of in-house sanitation services -- apart from recycling, which we had already outsourced to MSV -- included underpaying workers, who were inexplicably devoted to working for us, and ownership of three garbage trucks, one or two of which didn't work, and all of which leaked pools of foul-smelling domestic excrement in the streets?  More than likely so.

We needed professional help, and we all realized it.  A Charter Review Committee recommended that we transition to professional management, the then Commission endorsed the suggestion, and this Charter change was approved by Village voters in 2005.  Our first "search" began promptly.

Since we never before had a manager, and we frankly didn't know the first thing about how to work with one, or even how to find one, someone, presumably on the then Commission, made some calls.  Merritt Stierheim recommended his old friend, Frank Spence, who was then retired, as someone who could get us started.  Frank was never going to do any more than get us started.  Not only was he retired, but he lived up in Palm Beach County, he was busy looking after his very elderly and infirm mother, and he was waiting for her to die, so he could go join his ex-wife and his children in the Pacific northwest.  But he agreed to help us get things going.  I don't know whether it was Frank or someone else (Commissioners, possibly) who chose a salary number.  But we swallowed hard, and agreed to pay it.

Frank wasn't here long, as he promised he wouldn't be, and when he resigned, then Village clerk Maria Camara stepped into the interim responsibility while we found someone else.  We chose whatever qualifications we thought would be about right, and we offered about the same salary we paid Frank.  That was good enough for Ana Garcia, and a number of other applicants.  Ana impressed us all, and we hired her.

Now, about that salary.  We knew it was low.  We weren't kidding ourselves.  It attracted Frank Spence to do us a favor, and that favor would be short term.  Our expectation after Frank was that we would get either someone just coming out of municipal manager school, and needing a first job, or someone with good skills, but who had never before been a full municipal manager.  Their first such job would be with us, and we would be a stepping stone for them.  If we chose properly, we would get a talented person with something to prove, and they would get an important resume entry.  Which they would then parlay into a higher paying job.  They'd stay with us for X number of years.  And setting aside the nonsense Ana put up with from Steve Bernard, Bryan Cooper, Noah Jacobs, and Barbara Watts, which might have been reason enough to leave BP, that's exactly what happened.  Ana took a job paying twice as much just up the road in CNMB.  She helped us a lot when she was here, and her having been here helped her.

So then, it was back to Maria Camara briefly, and onto Heidi Siegel.  Now, it's critically important to restate that we advertised for this position.  We advertised what the job was, what credentials we wanted, and what the salary offer was.  And we got plenty of responses, a good number of them from very impressive-looking applicants.  We worked to reduce the number of applicants to three finalists, and we worked harder to choose one of the three.  Heidi was just like Ana, in that she had worked in various levels of municipal management for a good amount of time, but she had never been a full municipal manager.  That designation is important on a CV.  It's "worth money" to get a job that results in that title.  The person who takes a job like that is trying to go places.  They want that job, and they want to do well there.  Heidi said to us in a public interview of finalists, in response to a direct question on the matter, that she expected to be here for "five or six years."  She knew what Ana knew, and what many applicants like that knew.  This wasn't a forever job.  But it was a good job, and it was a great opportunity.  And we knew that, too.

Heidi was very unfairly blamed for various problems -- mostly cost overruns -- involved with the log cabin renovation and the administration building construction.  She wasn't wrong.  David Coviello, Roxy Ross, and I stood by her through what some Commission meeting attendees experienced as an attempted lynching.  But Heidi lost the devotion of one of us over something unrelated, and when she realized that, she resigned.  So up stepped Maria Camara again.

And again, we advertised, just as we always had.  We said what we wanted, and what we would pay.  And we had lots of applicants.  Sharon Ragoonan was just like Ana and Heidi, in that she'd had loads of great experience, but she'd never been a full manager before.  She took a pay cut to get that opportunity with us.  Had Tracy Truppman not ruined our system, we would have continued along the road to success.  It's not every municipality's style of success, but it's been very successful for us.

So, back to our two neighbors who said we don't pay enough.  One of them quoted a suggestion that we should be paying over twice what we pay.  There are various reasons we can't do that, at least not without a very considerable increase in the level at which we tax ourselves (an increase to which we have persistently been unwilling to commit, for any purposes at all), but this neighbor privately offered me a different scheme.  "A good manager will bring in more than enough money from grants and other leveraged sources to compensate for what we pay them, plus!"  This proposal places the imagined highly paid manager in a position to spend some proportion of his or her time looking for support for his or her own salary.  I'm reminded of the Congresspeople who spend shocking amounts of time on the phone, looking for donors for their next campaign.  This, instead of doing what the voters pay them to do.  A version of this scheme happened at an organization on whose board I sit.  Except it was the other way around.  The founder of the organization got a grant that would specifically pay for a certain kind of help, and the helper engaged was a public relations and fund-raising person.  It's been recent, and we're all under the burden of the coronavirus, and the organization cannot function normally anyway, because it's a performing arts organization, but this new employee has done nothing (yet) that the founder hadn't already been doing.  It's just that he doesn't cost the organization anything, because the grant pays him.  So the point is, I'm not sure this idea from our neighbor is a useful one for us.  And this neighbor is using as a model the neighbor's experience with vastly larger and more complex organizations than is BP.

The other neighbor took a different view of the situation: "I am really disappointed in the state of things in BP, and I have been for a long time...I feel that the promise of professional management that was made to the voters who upheld the Charter change so many years ago has been broken.  We really have not had professional management in quite some time.  I don't think we'll get it, either...Not with the salary we pay."  This is a curious statement, particularly with the reference to our not having had professional management "in quite some time."  This suggests that in our neighbor's memory and experience of it, there was a time that the neighbor felt we did have professional management.  At least so that it satisfied this neighbor.  The neighbor did not specify which of our professional managers was considered satisfactory.  Also, there's the final reference to salary.  But since we've paid essentially the same salary to all of our managers, then salary was apparently not the determining factor to who was considered satisfactory.  We've paid the most to our worst managers (Krishan Manners and David Hernandez).  We have some flexibility.

The theory, then, from at least two of our neighbors, is that we can't have good management unless we pay much more than we do.  But it's not true.  Not only is the theory wrong, but it's not even our actual experience.  We've had very good management (Ana, Heidi, and at least the promise of Sharon).  And lots of choice.  It's just that we can't expect anyone to stay for decades.  We trade longevity, or perhaps, as some might look at it, stability, for much lower cost.  But the same neighbor who said a higher paid manager could scare up his own salary also complained that without that kind of basis for stability, we would continue to suffer burnout, among all of our staff.  Except we never have.  No one has ever left here because of burnout, unless Ana Garcia secretly did.  But that was our fault for mistreating her, not because we didn't pay her enough.  We do fine, when we have adaptive Commissions.  For the past three and a half years, we've had breathtakingly maladaptive Commissions.  We still do, but that can change.  In November.