City Hall Is what we have here a failure to communicate?
Tuesday, August 6, 2013 @ 3:45 AM
By Peter Ewart
City Hall has created a new position, Director of Communications, and has had it posted for the last several weeks. Presumably, it will be supplanting the previous lead communications position which had the title Manager, Communications and Citizen Engagement, Media Relations.
Will the change to Director status mean that the salary will be upped further (back in 2009, it was $95,000 plus benefits)? That remains to be seen, although other Director salaries at City Hall are up in the six figure range, much higher than $95,000. The new Director will supervise two professional positions and report directly to City Manager Beth James (rather than first going through Corporate Services Director Kathleen Soltis, as the Manager currently does).
The job description on the City website sounds impressive. The new Director will be “high profile” and “play and integral role in raising citizen and business awareness of key initiatives”, be responsible for developing, implementing and overseeing corporate communications, and identifying “key issues at the community, provincial and national level and developing communication strategies and programs in response to those issues.”
Interestingly, the job description will also include writing speeches and designing presentations “for the Mayor and/or City manager.” It seemed in the old days that only presidents and prime ministers had their own speech writers. Now it appears that the mayor and city manager of a city in northern British Columbia will also get their very own highly paid speech writer. It must be progress.
In any case, clearly, the plan is to ramp up communications at City Hall and spend a bunch of money doing it. Now why might that be? Could it have anything to do with City Hall’s botched promotion of the River Road dike proposal, its defeat in the subsequent AAP, the BC Supreme Court ruling against the City in the Haldi Road court case, the unpopularity of the Core Services Review, the failed attempt to sell the Pine Valley Golf Course, the downtown paid parking debacle, and so on?
Is what we have here (as in the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke) “a failure to communicate”? Or does the problem lie with the content of the policies that Mayor Green and her supporters on Council have attempted to push?
Perhaps it has become an axiom of modern politics that the more discredited and unpopular your policies are, the more that the Communications and Public Relations budget gets jacked up using taxpayer money.
But the problem will not go away – no matter how much is spent prettifying the appearance of a phenomenon, its essence remains.
Peter Ewart is a columnist and writer based in Prince George, British Columbia. He can be reached at: peter.ewart@shaw.ca
Comments
What a pile of asinine garbage. Time to craft another letter to Councilors. I would encourage others to do the same. Maybe if they get inundated by angry e-mails everytime the city makes a stupid money wasting decision, they will reexamine decisions.
The DBIA survey was supposedly close on July 20, 2013.
1. It is great that it is located on the city web site even though it is not a survey of the City.
2. It is August 6 now. Why is it still on there?
3. If it has been extended, why does it not say so.
They have had people in charge of communications for some time, no matter what their titles and their salaries have been. If they cannot look after such matters and hold people accountable, they may as well not have a communications department.
But if they do have a department such as that, then ramp up the quality of communication whether it is those “little” things or the weird ones such as the caper about the baby born to the royal couple.
Then there is the spin part. And we all know that PG is very poor at that. I do not know whether it is because the persons in charge of communications over the last few years were not the best at their job, or whether they were just add ones who could not effect change in attitudes.
I think we need to hear from Beth James and we need to hear from the Mayor. If they need the help of a professional communicator, so be it, although the City Manager should really be capable of doing that since it should have been determined at time of hiring. The Mayor is another matter. There are no qualifications required for a mayor. The mayor gets voted in. Some have a gift of speaking to individuals and the public, such as Dan Rogers has, while others do not. Nothing short of major schooling in the art of communication and practice, practice, practice will make much change.
Just please hire someone capable and experienced in this area, listen to the person’s advice, and do not make the individual the talking head. All money will be wasted once more otherwise.
Just like potholes need to be looked after, credibility gaps need to be looked after.
Credibility gaps may occur because what is said is not being done, or what is said is not the truth, or what is said is garbled.
When the city has pothole problems, hire a person who knows how to deal with it.
When the city has a credibility problem, hire a person who knows how to deal with it.
When those people who have been hired to take care of those types of issues are found incapable of doing so, then hire a City Manager who knows how to hire the right person and knows how to keep them accountable.
As citizens, we have the responsibility to keep a close watch on Council and Mayor as well as the City Manager.
what happened to the last communications person?
i would think that the individual councilors and managers/directors etc. could handle their own communications. we are a small community, i cannot see the justification for this position being created at this time when i feel there are for more pressing issues of a much higher priority.
I may be wrong .The last communication person is still employed by the city,communicating in a different department.
The last communications manager (Mike Davis) took a communications job with the 2015 Winter Games. His position was filled by Chris Bone. It will be interesting to see who they hire. Could it be another **out of towner** like the City Manager, who will work closely with the City Manager to help implement her agenda??
In any event I see the beginning of an attempt to put up barriers to local citizens, and other groups getting immediate information from City Hall. My guess is that most requests for information will be filtered through the communications manager, and the City Manager, and over time we will get answers.
Keep in mind that the City Manager has put forward a proposal for a **code of conduct** for Councillors which will make it more difficult for them to get information directly from department heads, and would require them to go through the Manager. This may or may not be a good thing. One thing is certain, it will require a majority vote of Council for it to be approved, and it appears at this time, it is not well received.
We need to ensure that all information is easily available to local citizens (other than that covered by closed meetings). We do not need any **stonewalling** at City Hall.
The new City Manager was hired for her expertise in certain areas and I believe that we are starting to see some of what she intends to do. The question is, is it good for the City as a whole, or is it good for the Mayor and some of her cohorts.
City Hall? Communications? “Talk to the hand”. A very expensive hand even if I do say so myself.
I wouldn’t want that job. Communicating to the public, who say they want the truth, but can’t handle it. Must be a good sugar coater.
Why keep the public informed? Keep it in the dark as much as possible and feed it fertilizer – like mushrooms.
We were losing 80k a year removing parking meters and now will spend 1.1 million plus 100k+ a year maintenance costs to save that 80k…
Think of it, scrap the meters and this position and we will be 20K or more to the green in the future!
“the job description will also include writing speeches “
didn’t Green hire an assistant also at the cost of $75 000? Wasn’t one of their job descriptions writing speeches?
Sounds like more wool (for over our eyes) and more bafflegab to me.
Why can’t city hall and council simply be honest and transparent with us? Lay all the facts on the table and then tell us why they have decided what they have? If we think its right, then fine. If not, then we need to have a say in it.
^^^LOL I just about fell out of my chair LOL
Remeber the old saying “you voted us in and we now represent you” LOL
Give: “Why can’t city hall and council simply be honest and transparent with us? Lay all the facts on the table and then tell us why they have decided what they have?”
As I said, people aren’t interested in the truth. If a politician actually did that, they would never get elected or re-elected.
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