City of Santa Barbara, CA Succession Program
    Recognizing that there will be a major turnover in management in the next five to ten years, the City's Executive Management Team explored several strategies to plan for the continuation of a high performance organization through a commitment to sustained initiatives that engage outside the box thinking to attract, develop, and retain needed talent in the City of Santa Barbara.

    In the end, the team produced six strategies which form the City’s “Succession Program.”

Washington, Oregon City Managers Build Self-Sustaining Relationships with Communities in Poland

The mission of ICMA is to create excellence in local governance by developing and fostering professional local government management worldwide. In the case of Poland, a number of ICMA members from the states of Washington and Oregon have taken this mission to heart, by working to establish and strengthen self-sustaining relationships with their counterparts in Poland.

With funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), ICMA International worked intensively in Poland with local government leaders and their communities for a little more than 10 years. Building on the efforts of the Solidarity movement, Poland was a leader in the transition to democracy and a market economy in Central Europe after 1989. While the last of those ICMA projects ended in 2001, many of the relationships between municipal managers in the United States and their counterparts in Poland that sprung up because of that USAID contract work have continued, and have even expanded.

One leader in these ongoing ventures has been Lloyd Halverson, city administrator of Camas, Washington. Halverson worked in Poland for 15 months for PricewaterhouseCoopers as a consultant with a project funded by USAID, the Local Government Partnership Program, for which ICMA also provided several full-time staff members.

After he returned to the U.S., Halverson maintained his personal connections with many local government officials in Poland and also sought to involve other city managers in Washington and Oregon in a wide range of activities. Delegations from Washington and Oregon have visited various Polish cities, and Polish officials have traveled to those two states. Washington and Oregon officials have given seminars in Poland on various aspects of local government management. Exhibits of art have been exchanged between communities in Poland and Washington. Camas and three Polish cities have become official “sister cities.”

In May 2004, Camas and the Oregon community of Hillsboro signed a formal partnership accord with the cities of Morawica, Krapkowice, and Zabierzow. That agreement provided a framework for the various activities among the communities, and it also formally affiliated the new partnership with cities in Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the Ukraine that already had ongoing relationships with those three Polish cities.

Efforts by Halverson and other Washington municipal managers culminated in March 2007 with the signing of an agreement between the Washington City/County Management Association (WCMA) and two Polish professional groups. One is an association for municipal officials in Swietokrzyski (Holy Cross) Province, and the other is the Foundation in Support of Local Democracy, which supports the development of local self-governance and public administration in Poland and other countries in transition.

Bob Jean, city manager of University Place, Washington, hopes he can help convince additional state associations to follow this example. This approach, says Jean, “is a low-cost, high-leverage strategy.” When the municipal officials from one country visit their counterparts in the other country, they stay in the local officials’ homes, so the only major expense is the air travel. Jean wants to reduce that cost in the future, especially for municipal officials coming to the U.S., by seeking out businesses to serve as sponsors for the exchanges.

While this approach may be appropriate for Poland and other emerging democracies, it won’t work everywhere, says Jean. For countries like Iraq, that are still facing very difficult circumstances, U.S. government financial support will likely be needed to attract salaried professionals for the work. “But,” says Jean, “we want to see these kinds of state-to-state activities expanded. And there can be other alternatives to [U.S. government] funding, such as person-to-person and city-to-city relationships.”

Another enthusiastic supporter of the WCMA efforts is Bill McDonald, city administrator of Dupont, Washington. McDonald has traveled to Poland several times to help with seminars, giving presentations on such subjects as basic principles of local government, economic development, and the council-manager form of government. He and his wife hosted a Polish official in their home for a three-week visit.

During a recent visit by a Polish delegation to Dupont, the mayor and the council were deeply impressed by the Poles’ commitment to democracy. “Several of them [the Dupont officials] said it was a life-changing experience,” reported McDonald. “It shrunk the globe. The personal connection with people who have had a democracy for less than 20 years has been remarkable. Seeing the passion of the Poles has been infectious. I want to help them to be successful.” 

To learn more about the structure of local government in Poland, go to Autorités locales du Monde/World Local Authoritieshttp://www.almwla.org/

 

 



For related news, information, and resources, visit Citizen and Resident Participation, Management, and Council-Manager Form of Government in ICMA's Resource Center.