I've heard this argument before. More than once. On the surface of it, it's a sensible-sounding argument. The most respected (by me) person who made this argument is Kelly Mallette. The argument is that BP, for example, cannot have a good enough manager unless we pay much more than we do. If we hire managers on the cheap, the argument goes, then they won't be good, and they'll fail us, and we'll probably have to fire them. Because they're not good. Because you get what you pay for. Or they'll quit, because we don't pay them enough to work here. As I said, on the surface of it, it's a sensible-sounding argument. And it would make even more sense if it was true.
Yup, we pay low, or very low, on the manager compensation scale. But if it was true that we pay so low that no manager in his or her right mind would work here, then no one of any quality, and certainly not of respectable credentials, would apply for the job. But they do. Lots of them do. Some of them have been full managers elsewhere, and they want to settle in south Florida. Some like the idea of managing our small community, and they want to coast. Some have put in enough years somewhere else that they're getting what's a nice enough pension, and they now want what they think will be an easier job, so they can further pad their incomes. But that group do apply.
Another group who apply, and the ones with whom we've had great experience, are the ones who've been in municipal service, but never before been full managers. We're a critically important resume boost for them. We're their ticket to a bigger and higher paying job elsewhere, once they show what they can do. So they're hungry. They're hungry for the resume boost, but they're also hungry to impress. They want to do a great job here, so the better-endowed later employer will see how valuable, and immensely capable, they are. That group begin employment with us, and their clocks are already running. They figure it will take them X number of years to show how terrific they are, at which point they'll either get courted by someone else, or they'll start the search for the bigger money job.
But here's the problem. First of all, as I said, it's not true that we don't offer enough to attract applicants, and managers who will sign employment contracts with us. Second, we have fired only one manager for not doing a good job, and the glaring reason he didn't do a good job is that the Commission that controlled him didn't want him to do a good job. It was the next Commission that fired him. And he was paid higher than our usual scale, too. And third, no manager has ever left us simply because a better paying job became available. The closest we ever came to something that looked like that was Ana Garcia's departure for twice the money in CNMB. But the then Commission majority had given her such a hard time, and blocked so much of what she tried to do, that it would be unfair simply to explain her departure as based on a bigger pay check a few miles up the road. Was she going to leave at some point anyway, for more money elsewhere? Was Heidi Siegel? Was Sharon Ragoonan? Will Mario Diaz? Of course. But they weren't unhappy and resentful to be managing here. They weren't grudging about their work, because we disrespected them by not paying enough. And more important -- and the purpose of this post -- they would all have left anyway, even if we had paid double what we do. We have a problem we don't address.
I know this is going to sound like harping, and perhaps in a way it is, but the horribly conspicuous caricature was Tracy Truppman. Tracy, on the basis of no credentials and no relevant experience, applied for the job of manager of BP. That's the municipality where Tracy lives (still, as far as I know). If Tracy's application, and ambition, were the craziest joke anyone could concoct, Tracy is not at all the only person who's way ahead of herself in the thinking-she-knows-the-right-answer-and-how-to-actualize-it department. We've had, and still have, a number of BP residents who think they know better than anyone, and who think that what they think they know is of definitive, or dispositive, validity. They don't listen to anyone else, because they don't think they have to. What could anyone else tell them that they don't already know even better? What opinion could anyone else have that is any match for their superior knowledge and experience? Tracy, for example, hired Krishan Manners because Krishan didn't know how to manage a municipality, and had no ambition to take the relevant courses to begin to find out, and wouldn't stand in the way of Tracy's doing what she had already decided some years before she could do. And that's our problem. It could be Tracy, or Steve Bernard, or Bryan Cooper, or Noah Jacobs, or any of a number of other people who think that the ability to form an opinion, or simply to vote, is the same thing as knowing what you're talking, or thinking, about, and better than anyone else. And that whatever opinion you form must prevail over others'.
These are people who either chose to live in BP because it's a small pond in which they could fancy themselves big fish, or who came to realize there was a vacuum they could easily enough fill, that would provide for them the same result. So people like that find their little seats of power -- their little pseudo-fiefdoms -- and no one can back them down. (Well, some of us eventually could, but it was a lot of work, and a lot of damage happened before we finally got rid of them.)
And that's what was going to run managers out of here no matter how much we paid them. Unless the theory is that managers are more or less like prostitutes, and if you pay them enough, they'll tolerate, and surrender, anything. And pretend to be pleased about it.
A big enough fish will eat anything.
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