Tag Archives: cooperation

Alma College and City of Alma Persevere Together Through Good Times, Challenging Times

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By Mayor Mel Nyman and President Jeff Abernathy

Mayor Nyman & President Abernathy

Since its founding in 1886, Alma College has stood as a vital community partner, dramatically affecting the lives of those living in mid-Michigan and beyond. The college’s founding was made possible by Ammi Wright, a lumberman, businessman and civic leader who gave 30 acres of land and more than $300,000 to found and sustain the institution in its early years — a sum equivalent to more than $6.2 million today.

More than 125 years later, Alma College continues to value its role in the mid-Michigan community. The campus hosts the annual Alma Highland Arts Festival, which brings thousands of visitors to mid-Michigan to celebrate their Scottish heritage.

An Alma College student volunteers in the community.

As part of its mission, the college also promotes a “culture of service” in which students meet local needs through participation with numerous community agencies and organizations.

One of the key questions in the college’s most recent planning effort was how it could leverage its presence to ensure that the college can thrive together with the community. The resulting plan, while establishing important educational goals, includes an emphasis on creating a sustainable campus and community. It states directly: “We will assist our city of Alma — where we aim to create a seamless environment between the downtown and the campus— as well as communities across Mid-Michigan in order to help our region thrive in the decades to come.”

There is much to be thankful in our small community of Alma. Business is growing in the downtown. Within view of town, the largest wind farm in Michigan has risen, with 167 monuments to the new economy. The efforts by community leaders in collaboration with Alma College professors and students to address environmental challenges caused by a chemical company that left the area decades ago continue to make meaningful progress.

Downtown Alma

All this good news is especially welcome in Alma, where we have had our share of challenges. The most recent economic downtown hit mid-Michigan hard, and in October 2010, a ruinous fire all but destroyed a prominent landmark at the center of our downtown, Alma’s former Opera House. In such a close-knit community, nearly every citizen felt the impact of these and other challenges.

And yet, the values and benefits of living in a college town still appeal to many. Recent developments are evidence that collaborative college-town partnerships are making a difference. Those developments include:

The downtown Alma College bookstore.

  • In 2011, the college purchased a vacant building and moved its bookstore off campus and across the street into a location that formerly represented a geographic divide between town and gown. The college also partnered with Stucchi’s — a successful ice cream store that was destroyed in the downtown Opera House fire — and brought it in under the same roof. The new business is thriving, a welcome addition to the downtown where students and community members come together.
  • Kurt Wassenaar, an investor with local roots committed to revitalizing the downtown Alma business district, bought the burned Opera House and determined to save it from demolition. Today, the building is undergoing major renovations that will restore its historic features while providing new retail opportunities on the ground floor and, in a leasing partnership with Alma College, student apartments on the second and third floors.

    Alma Fall Festival helps bring the city and college together.

  • Alma College has set an aggressive goal to place a large number of interns across mid-Michigan in an effort to help non-profits and governmental entities that lost so many resources in the recent downturn. Such work is hugely beneficial to Alma students even as it will help to sustain the communities across our region. Alma College students can learn how to leave positive footprints in Alma and wherever they go in the future.
  • Alma College’s Center for Responsible Leadership and the Gratiot Area Chamber of Commerce sponsor an annual Fall Festival in October in downtown Alma. The purpose of the event is to strengthen the connection between the college and community and to encourage community members, merchants and students to meet and interact in a positive and education atmosphere. Activities include merchant specials and giveaways, raffle drawings, face and pumpkin painting, kids activities and more.

Reaching out to the community is a part of Alma College’s mission to “prepare graduates who think critically, serve generously, lead purposefully and live responsively.” We remain committed to the exciting work of building and nurturing community partnerships that will be key to the college’s future as well as that of our town and region.

Mel Nyman is the Mayor of Alma and Jeff Abernathy is the President of Alma College.

Cooperation, Consolidation, Bigfoot, Roswell and other Famous Myths

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If I can figure out how to license the phrase cooperation and consolidation, I could retire tomorrow.  As I travel around the state and country working on local government issues, I find that it may be the most overused, and in my view, over heralded phrase in local government. My concern isn’t that I hear it so much, but rather that there is a belief that this will solve the ills created by of a decade of declining revenues and a couple generations worth of underfunded legacy costs.  I think we are more likely to see Sasquatch flying a space ship than we are to solve a broken financial model with consolidation.

Contrary to popular belief, local governments are for the most part well run and operate fairly lean.  Are their advantages to be gained by cooperating with your neighbors or consolidating services?  Probably.  Economies of scale generally will yield efficiencies that can lower the cost of service delivery, but to what end?  If our starting point is two communities that do not provide services to the level we all expect, isn’t it like combining two cars in need of repair and declaring victory because it drives?  Is this our vision for the future?

I don’t believe that the greatest challenge is being more efficient nor is the greatest benefit in combining departments or merging services.  The single biggest financial burden that our core communities are struggling with are legacy costs. Pending legislation in Michigan will help communities to draw a line in the sand and many already have, but they have no ability change the cost structure for those who have vested benefits or have left service.  More needs to be done.  In many established communities, the ratio of retirees to active employees is more than 2 to 1 with far more being spent on healthcare for retirees than is spent on active employees.  The hurdles both on both the human and political level to address this are substantial, but without real change it is not inconceivable that the only services a community might offer will be to hold elections, collect taxes, and pay and insure retirees.

It’s simply unsustainable.

 

Can I borrow some please?

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Many topics aren’t directly on point, but part of the challenge we face is how to apply lessons from other fields and disciplines and make them relevant in a municipal context. I came across this blog post in the Harvard Business Review, and frankly the headline resonated: When You Can’t Innovate, Copy.

While innovations are vital, it is impractical to think that we can all be innovators. For many practitioners, being a jack of all trades is practically part of the job description. This approach, while often necessary leaves little time to be truly innovate and explore new ways of doing things.

So what are we to do with limited resources, and even less time available to research, test, and implement new ways of doing business? Why not copy from your peers that have figured it out? Unlike when you did it in Algebra class, this form of copying won’t get a note sent home to your mother. This is a way of leveraging proven approaches to maximize your limited resources and improve your community along the way.

There are a variety places to look for what your colleagues are doing well. The League’s Community Excellence Award program was started for just this purpose. It provides members a platform to tell others about their accomplishments, but perhaps more importantly it is a way for the rest of us to learn from their experiences. The National League of Cities and the International City/County Management Association can be excellent resources for innovative ideas as well.

A mentor of mine often said “there aren’t any new ideas, so steal everything.” While I don’t necessarily agree with the literal interpretation, the idea was clear and on point. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If you see something that works, make it your own. As Charles Caleb Colton once said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

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Better, Faster, Cheaper

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Better, Faster, Cheaper.  It is the battle cry of any good government reformist.  How can you argue with the premise?  Shouldn’t we all strive to reach this lofty goal? I certainly think we should.   In reality though, it seems that the focus as of late is really only on cheaper & faster when we talk about government services.  Better never enters into the dialogue.  If something costs less, then that becomes the default answer.  We talk about, but our policies don’t back up the rhetoric.

I’ll be the first to admit that many of the processes that we have engaged in are not cheapest or fastest, but let’s not forget that part of this is by design.  So why would we intentionally have inefficient processes?  Well, another rallying cry of any good government reformist is transparency and accountability.  Everyone needs to know everything at all times.  Is this better, faster, cheaper?  Well it is certainly not faster or cheaper. The need/desire to be open and transparent leads to a slow, costly, cumbersome bureaucracy.  Is it open and transparent?  Yes it is.  Is it efficient?  No, it is not.

Now this does not absolve us of the need to be the best at what we do.  I would also suggest that the best is rarely if ever the cheapest.  The old adage that you get what you pay for is true in the private sector, your home, and in local government.  Ask any successful business person, what is the most important ingredient to a successful enterprise?  The answer will uniformly be talent.  Hire the best people you can and let them do their thing.  I would suggest to those who believe that the best way to save money is to impose further restrictions on locals consider this concept.  By employing a top down, control filled environment as a way of controlling costs: they are in reality making every government less efficient.  We need to attract the best and brightest people possible and let them lead.

We must remember good people always have options.  If we create an environment where the best and brightest choose not to serve locally because we have made it untenable, have we won because it’s cheaper? Are we better off if we have degraded the talent we can attract because of the environment we have created?  Would any business survive with this approach?  Clearly not.  Why then would we use this as our model of success for local government?  In the phrase better, faster, cheaper:  better comes first for a reason.  We should be striving to make Michigan’s communities the best, not the cheapest.

Is it as simple as cutting costs?

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So much is being made about the need for government to be more efficient. Consolidation and collaboration are the buzz words of the day, and are presented as the cure all for the financial challenges that all local governments are facing. So is it really that simple? Is it true that all we need to do is cut costs to some hypothetical number we can afford?

It occurs to me that the simplest challenge that locals face is matching costs to revenues. It’s something anyone with simple math skills can do. What I am bringing in must exceed or equal what goes out, simple stuff. Why then do so many locals have financial issues? The answer lies in the paradoxical nature of local government services. Every time you cut services you reduce the earning capacity of the city.

So why would service cuts diminish a cities earning capacity? While it is easy to understand that police cost money, in fact a lot of money. It’s harder to understand how cutting costs, a.k.a. services, reduce a cities ability to raise revenue. Think about it like this: what is the cities equivalent of a manufacturing company’s factory? Or to say it another way, how does a city generate revenue? It’s the properties located in that city, and taxes assessed against the “value” associated with those properties. So a simple query: would you pay more for a house in a community with “more” services or “less” services? Great parks or no parks? Good roads or poor roads? Adequate public safety or minimal public safety? I think the answers to all these questions are obvious. Better services equate to better property values, and increased revenue to provide critical services.

Turn around companies make a very handsome living by helping companies be more efficient, and shed themselves of losing components of their business. I am quite certain that as part of that quest for efficiency they would not eliminate the fundamental earning capacity of the company. If the books were balanced by eliminating the manufacturing capacity of the company, then there is no company. The same holds true for cities. Any effort to restructure and reduce costs must preserve the earning capacity of the city. In other words, if our cost cutting only approach leaves a place where people don’t want to live, then we have failed. Herein lays the challenge before us. Increase efficiencies to be sure, but retain the character and fiber of our communities. If not, we have only exacerbated the very problem we set out to solve.