PERSONAL COMMUNICATION

Members of the city council:

I am writing you about two items on the agenda for your meeting on March
20, 2007.

These items are:

1. The management raises (Item F3)
2. Alternative work schedules (Item H1)

None of the attachments relating to management raises are available on
the city web site as of now (Friday, 3/16 before 5:00 p.m.) for Item
F3. Yet that is the "meat" of exactly what the council asked for when
this item was put over some weeks ago. Yet, this approach denies me
practical and timely access to that information. This needs to stop. I
surely hope too there is no bigger picture attempt here to hide the ball
on this from more general access and availability of this information. I
respectfully request that council move to continue this item to yet a
future meeting date, and to publish that information more broadly on the
web site at that time. Frankly, I would like you to send a message that
this approach and this level of preparation, timeliness and disclosure
is not acceptable.

That brings me to my second point, alternative work schedules. First, I
view the report as ultimately non-responsive to the concerns expressed
some weeks ago. I'll discuss that more in the next paragraph. Those
concerns were expressed by both council members, and members of the
public, including myself. Among them were exactly the situation arising
in my first point above about management compensation information. The
city's offices are closed today, so there is no easy way for me to get
the information for item F3 as of now directly from the city. In that
regard, I would like the council immediately to direct staff that for
any council meeting where the meeting falls on a Tuesday following a
Friday day off, those materials be published no later than the preceding
Wednesday. That way you will at least have the offices one day
following the initial publication before the weekend. As I have said
before I think they should be published a fair amount earlier, but
that's a bare minimum.

With respect to the alternative work schedules staff report, I urge the
council to seek far more information. The staff report is nothing but a
recitation of reasons this was enacted five plus years ago. It fails
even to mention recent concerns raised (including by council members),
it fails to identify costs and issues of the current approach, it fails
to identify changes in the labor market that have occurred in the past
five years, and it fails to update statistics that are now over five
years old. Most importantly it doesn't even appear to acknowledge the
possibility of service issues. That is the real nub of exactly the
issue. That's a primary role of the city. Employees help service that
role. Somehow we seem to have carts and horses confused or even lost
here. Let's get the topic correctly focused: the 9/80 work schedule
and service and availability issues that have been created. In general,
I also expect higher quality reports than this. I think the quality of
reports in general has been a key issue bogging the council down for
some time now.

Let me close again with the clear juxtaposition of these two items. The
failure to maintain a regular 5 day work week that the normal working
business sector does and that the public expects leads directly to the
public's (and your) inability to get information relevant to our public
processes, and in this case items I even have specifically commented on
at recent meetings. That needs fixing, in both regards.

Best, Elias Blawie

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Received on Fri Mar 16 16:48:17 2007