Bonanza Column 277: Too Little, Too Late?

While most people consider it unseemly, the most human of vices is the urge to say “I told you so,” so I’m not going to say that.

Having not said that, it’s good to see that the IVGID Board has come to its senses and voted to hire a search firm to fill the GM position. While the Bonanza’s story on the meeting cast is as “Joe Wolfe getting his wish,” it was much more than that. A majority of the trustees now see that the catch-as-catch-can process of advertising and hoping is insufficient. Of 72 applications received, 11, or 15% were considered “A” level by the HR Director, with 26 “B” or fall-back candidates. Put another way, only about half of the applications were considered at least marginally acceptable. I’ve never seen an executive search firm provide such a poor showing for a senior position – almost always search firms create an interesting problem for their clients of choosing among 3 to 5 outstanding candidates, and that’s what I’d expect from Peckham and McKenny, the firm the Board has retained.

An aspect of last week’s meeting that continues to trouble me is the continuing seeming intransigence of Trustees Hammerel and Smith, on anything that touches on the GM, whether current or future. While Hammerel was quoted in the Bonanza ad being “unimpressed” with the candidates who have applied to date, he seems to think that doing more of the same process will produce better results, and that there is no need to hurry. Smith was, at least, favorably impressed with at least some of the applicants, a view apparently not shared by the other Trustees.

For those who are coming late to the conversation, it’s important to note an important difference between an advertising campaign and a recruiting effort by an experienced and expert search firm. The first will reach several groups of people: the unqualified (apparently about half of the current group), the currently unemployed, and those currently employed who are looking to leave their position. A search firm will reach out to the last two groups but will also have a network of contacts that will lead them to currently employed people who, while they may not be actively looking, might be interested in the opportunity. That will yield a much better selection of candidates.

The current GM has nine months left in his contract. Nine months is not a lot of time to recruit at this level when you take into account finding people, contacting them, one or more site visits, interviews, and the possible need for the candidate selected to give notice in their current job. It would be ideal, in my view to have some overlap so that the handoff is clean and efficient, which shortens the time even more. While I believe the Board should have taken this action in January, that’s water under the bridge and at least they’ve taken the action now, three months later. We can only hope this presages a more rational deliberative process for the Board going forward.

Aw heck: I told you so.

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Bonanza Column 276 - Teenagers vs. Corn

Warning: This is going to be one of those liberal, bleeding-heart columns where I take the distasteful (to Conservatives) position that human life is actually more important than business profits. If you’re one of those who find this position somewhere between objectionable and disgusting, you can stop reading now and start writing your response.

If there was any doubt that the prevailing paradigm in American business is “profits before people,” this will remove it. Yes, there are enlightened businesses that go against this paradigm, but overall the paradigm rules.

If you didn’t grow up in the Midwest, and on a farm at that, the term “walking the corn” may evoke images of Stephen King novels or “Field of Dreams,” but the reality is far darker than that. When corn kernels are blown into silos, they tend to stick to the walls and to clump up, which jams machinery and makes moving the corn out of the silo difficult. The way farmers deal with this is to send workers into the silos, which are often on the order of four stories high, to walk on the corn and break up the clumps. Generally these are minimum wage workers and often they are teenagers.

Walking the corn by itself is not too dangerous. Silos filled with corn, wheat or soybeans become death traps, however, when grain cascades out of control, asphyxiating or crushing their victims and creating vortex effects that suck the workers deep into the grain. Since 2007, 80 farmworkers have died in silo accidents; 14 of them were teenage boys. These deaths were almost totally preventable.

 

Even though the rate of serious injury and fatalities on American farms has fallen, the number of workers dying by entrapment in grain bins and silos has remained steady. The annual number of such accidents actually rose throughout the past decade, reaching a peak of at least 26 deaths in 2010, before dropping somewhat since. Nearly 20 percent of all serious grain bin accidents involve workers under the age of 20.

The New York Times quotes Wayne Bauer, the safety director at the Star of the West Milling Company in Frankenmuth, Mich., which operates grain elevators in five states as saying: “The concept of walking down the grain should be avoided at all costs, and people sending kids into spaces where they have no business being deserve to be fined.”

To understand the connection between these deaths (and likely hundreds more that go unreported) and the profit motive, you have to understand that, if all the machinery were shut off and nothing other than walking the corn was happening, the danger would be minimal. However, in every case the people running the operation kept grain pouring into the silos, opened the outlet chutes, or both, creating a suction that turned harmless yellow corn into the equivalent of quicksand. Rather than interrupt the operation and have a few hours of down time, they put the workers at risk and were directly responsible for these deaths.

Under Federal Law this sort of safety violation is a misdemeanor, and OSHA typically reduces what little penalties there are. US District Attorneys don’t make the kind of career-advancing splash they love prosecuting misdemeanors, so the Justice Department rarely if ever prosecutes. In other words, the agribusiness concerns that own the silos prosper and the workers die or nearly die. One 20-year old watched two friends, one 19 and one 14 die – the 14-year old was sucked down so far he was beyond reach. As the corn rose up around the 20-year old, he kept a hand free and tried to clear corn away from the face of his friend whose arms were pinned. Ultimately he was unsuccessful and watched as his friend was buried and suffocated.

For the irony fans among us, if any of those teenagers had thought to bring an animal from an endangered species into the silo with him, the animal’s death would have been a felony under Federal Law.

 

Last year the Labor Department proposed new regulations aimed at tightening protections for children doing farm work. The proposed regulations would have prohibited children under 18 from working in large commercial grain bins, silos or other enclosed spaces. But the Obama administration, sensitive to Republican charges that it was choking the economy with expensive regulations, pulled back the proposed rules this year in the face of furious farm-state objections.

After all, there’s a lot of teenagers out there, but corn is in short supply.

 

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Bonanza Column 275 - How is the IVGID Board like the US Senate?

I had occasion last week to sit down with a newcomer to Incline Village who wanted to discuss the local political landscape. This gentleman is no stranger to politics – he is a retired professor of International Relations at a major university, a position he took following a career in Washington DC working in the Pentagon, the State Department and the Congress.

Our conversation was wide-ranging, covering everything from local to national issues, and we were both struck by what seemed to us to be parallels among those levels.

Take the gridlock in the Senate caused by the filibuster rules – most recently we saw Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) waste thirteen hours of the Senate’s time to no good purpose - he spent the time talking mostly about the issue of drones. Now this is an issue that deserves considered debate, but the context for Paul’s semi-coherent rant was the President’s nomination of James Brennan as CIA Director, and the sole purpose of it was to delay Brennan’s confirmation which eventually passed 63-34 vote after a vote of 81-16 to end Paul’s filibuster.

IVGID Board meetings don’t allow for the possibility of a filibuster as such, but we’ve seen again and again how one or a few individuals both on and off the Board can bring the Board’s ability to transact the District’s business to a grinding halt. Most recently, in the meeting week before last, two trustee’s objection to the General Manager’s long-standing policy of copying the Chair on any correspondence he has with Trustees was the occasion for stopping the meeting for an hour amid insinuations of open meeting law violations and general nefarious skullduggery.

I’ll grant that the GM’s using blind copying (bcc) rather than open copying (cc) was an error of judgment, one that he was quick to apologize for. Notwithstanding that, the policy makes sense on a number of levels, not least of which is the GM’s partnership with the Board Chair and the Board’s oft-avowed commitment to transparency. The attorney who was present as the Board’s Counsel did not offer any indication that this was a violation of Nevada’s complex open meeting law, and the matter could have been put to rest in minutes with the GM’s apology and a request that in future these communications be openly copied. Instead the conversation was contentious and often on the edge of belligerence – all in all another unprofessional performance by this Board.

Legislative deliberations, from the Senate to the IVGID Board are, by custom, polite to a fault. Often in the Senate we will hear one Senator refer to another as “my friend” while excoriating that person in the most vitriolic terms. Proponents of this pretense of civility argue that it keeps things from getting personal, and I’m willing to allow that that might be true. An unintended consequence of this custom, however, is that it mitigates against anyone openly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes or that something someone is saying is factually incorrect. It also makes it very difficult for leadership to keep things moving efficiently.

It’s still early days for the 2013 Board – in practice that means that inefficient and ineffective practices can still be nipped in the bud before they become ingrained and harder to change. Doing that, however, will take real leadership on the part of the Chair and those Trustees who have the courage not to be intimidated by those who aggressively push their point of view as if it were divinely inspired, whether that is the small, non-representative number of members of the public who have been working to cow the staff and Trustees for several years now or it is another Trustee who insists on his interests overriding those of the other Trustees, the District, or the public.

Just as the Senate, tiring of Sen. Paul’s nonsense, voted 81-16 to end his tirade, the Chair and the other Trustees need to speak up and intervene when one or two individuals try to dominate the conversation at the expense of getting real work done.

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Bonanza Column 274 - Time to Repeal SB 271

A bill (SB630) has been introduced in the California State Senate by Senators Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills) and Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) that, if enacted, could end the TRPA as we know it. While I realize that this would be welcomed in some short-sighted quarters, the impact could be disastrous for the lake and for residents of the basin.

My usual disclosure when I write about TRPA: While I did work for TRPA, I no longer have any administrative or management accountability there, though I am doing some training for the staff This column is intended to represent my views and my views alone, and not those of the agency or any of its staff or Governing Board.

Also, despite unfounded bloviating in a recent letter to the editor, I have no agenda with regard to TRPA. I do have, based on my experience there, profound respect and admiration for the commitment, integrity and expertise of those who work there.

The bill talks about California needing a contingency plan if Nevada goes forward with the provisions in its Senate Bill 271 which calls for the Silver State to withdraw from the bi-state Compact in 2015. SB271 was passed two years ago and was intended, as I understand it, to accelerate the process of updating the Regional Plan and to address what Nevada sees as inequities in the TRPA Governing Board voting structure under the Compact.

While the voting issue has not been addressed, SB271 had a major positive impact in that it did accelerate the RPU and in the process created a level of collaboration and cooperation between the two states that had not been seen before and that led to the near unanimous adoption of the Regional Plan in December.

There has been some talk in Nevada about repealing SB271 the current session, but the Sierra Club and Friends of the West Shore lawsuit to prevent the Regional Plan Update from taking effect could make Nevada leery of a repeal that they might see as premature.

The California bill states that “for California to have due time to protect its many interests in the Tahoe basin, the state will need to have a contingency plan in place prior to the dissolution of the bi-state Compact, as contemplated by Senate Bill 271.”

It goes on to say, “The bill would revise the membership of the governing body of the agency to eliminate the existing five members of the governing body, and prescribe requirements for the appointment of a new nine-member governing board. The bill would also revise the composition of a technical advisory committee required to be appointed by the agency, and would request the participation of a representative of the governing board of the Nevada Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. The bill would eliminate a provision authorizing the governing body of the agency to contract with the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency for services.”

In other words, there would be two TRPAs — one in California and one in Nevada — the exact opposite of the bistate collaboration that has taken place over the past couple of years, and no single body accountable for the environment of and around the lake. Kind of like when two outfielders go for a fly ball and it drops between them.

TRPA makes decisions, recommendations, and judgment calls that, unfounded bloviating to the contrary, are driven by the best available science and the commitment of its Governing Board and Staff to the sometime conflicting demands of the environment, the social milieu, and the economy of the Basin. The air, water, wildlife, and vegetation of the basin don't recognize the CA-NV state line. The Federal Government recognized this in setting up the TRPA, and even the most benighted intelligence should recognize it now.

The Nevada Legislature should do the right thing — they made their point, and made it well and effectively. Now it's time to repeal SB271 so we can all rest a bit easier.-->

Bonanza Column 273 - Don't let NLTFPD become average

Recently I had occasion to read an evaluation of the emergency medical services provided throughout Washoe County. The evaluation was done by the TriData Division of the System Planning Corporation under contract to Washoe County. TriData’s report included several findings and recommendations regarding actions that could be taken by the affected agencies including the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District.

 

The NLTFPD is the exclusive provider of emergency medical services for Incline Village and Crystal Bay. The Fire District has provided these services to our communities here at the Lake with great success for several years, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who lives or visits here who has less than the highest regard for the NLTFPD. The problem is that, as with so many things, the report fails to distinguish between the part of Washoe County that is inside the Tahoe Basin from the rest of the County.

 

EMS programs in the Truckee Meadows, including both Fire and REMSA in the Reno/Sparks area, come in for substantial criticism in the report, and TriData’s recommendations come under the heading of “Washoe County Wide” changes to emergency medical services that are needed.

 

The concern is that if County-Wide changes are made with a broad brush, NLTFPD’s ability to deliver the excellent service we have come to expect could be impacted.

 

The report recommends that “The future of EMS in Washoe County should include a countywide EMS system with responsibility for total system oversight…A countywide EMS system could be overseen by the Washoe [District Board of Health] or a Washoe County public safety agency. An EMS lead agency should include an EMS Manager and staff and an EMS Medical Director. We include several possible EMS organization models and specify EMS staff requirements.”

 

I have no argument with the notion that such oversight could result in improved service for Reno, Sparks, and most of the County, but I have every expectation that it would be disastrous for services here at the Lake. When you put an excellent service provider under management that is (a) distant and (b) broad in scope, you get what in statistics is called “regression toward the mean.” In other words, if NLTFPD is an A and the rest of the County is a C, everyone will get to be a B. Good for them, bad for us.

 

NFLTPD must obviously cooperate with Washoe County to ensure that any improvements to county-wide emergency medical services are successful. Any changes of ordinances, laws, protocols or certifications that may affect the operations of the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District’s existing ability to provide the high level of emergency medical services currently provided should require approval from the Board of Fire Directors of the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District, and may require approval of the voters of the District as well.

 

Rather than wait until we are fighting a defensive action, IV/CB residents should let the County know that we will not accept any solution, county-wide or otherwise, that detracts from the level of services we have and that our taxes pay for. The TriData report went to John Slaughter, Director of Management Services and Kurt Latipow, Fire Services Coordinator, in the Washoe County Manager's Office, and those would be two good people to communicate with, along with County Manager Katy Simon, the District Board of Health, the NLTFPD Board, and the IVGID Board of Trustees who should be in the forefront of this effort.

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Bonanza Column 272 - Time to Stop this Ridiculous Lawsuit

So once again we have the interests and opinions of a vocal few blocking the implementation of hard science and the will of the majority.

I’m referring of course to the ridiculous lawsuit by the Sierra Club and Friends of the West Shore attempting to block implementation of the TRPA Regional Plan Update (RPU) and the scurrilous, radical guest column in last week’s Bonanza by their hangers-on.

As a reminder, while I did work for TRPA I no longer have any administrative or management accountability there, though I am doing some training for the staff This column is intended to represent my views and my views alone, and not those of the Agency or any of its staff or Governing Board.

Let’s review the bidding: The RPU is the first significant update to environmental protection standards at Lake Tahoe since 1987. The update was years in the making, involved countless hours of scientific and public input, and fostered an unprecedented level of bi-state collaboration to come out with a plan that incorporates much of what the Sierra Club itself has advocated over the years. It institutes and retains growth control limits and restrictions that are among the strongest in the US.

The League to Save Lake Tahoe, historically an advocate for the most stringent environmental regulation and no friend of TRPA responded to the lawsuit this way:

“This is the wrong move for Lake Tahoe....While the plan is not perfect, it is a product of community collaboration and compromise, and is designed to be adaptive...litigation will likely result in the dissolution of this compact and no compact means no regional environmental standards for Lake Tahoe. Preserving the compact and implementing the RPU will provide the greatest long-term benefit to the lake and its communities.”

Similar responses came from the Nevada Conservation League and in a joint statement from California Secretary of Natural Resources, John Laird and Nevada Director of Conservation and Natural Resources, Leo Drozdoff. Laird and Drozdoff were the principal architects of the bi-state collaboration.

Despite all this, the Sierra Club and its partners apparently consider their opinion of what is good for Lake Tahoe superior to the collective conclusions of environmental scientists, the agencies of California and Nevada, the TRPA, the majority of public input and almost everyone else. I guess it must be nice to have that smug sense of superiority that is impervious to rational consideration – kind of like Wayne La Pierre and the NRA.

One of the basest fabrications on the part of these self-appointed guardians of what’s good for the rest of us is that somehow TRPA (and presumably the scientists, public, and state agencies) are “in the pocket of developers.” I worked at TRPA as a contract executive for a year, and if any largesse was being passed out by some evil cabal of developers I never saw any evidence of it and, worse yet, they missed me! If you’re out there, evil cabal, I’m waiting for my check. But I won’t hold my breath because no one had produced one shred of evidence to support that canard.

If you have the stomach to plow through the 33 pages of the legal complaint, you will see that it is poorly formulated and based on the thinnest foundation imaginable. The Federal Court should summarily dismiss it and can do so on any number of grounds.

One last thing: isn’t it time that these self-appointed “guardians of the lake” come clean about their real agendas and conflicts of interest? What about the realtor who rails against development but makes her living selling Mc Mansions on the lake shore to millionaires? What about the vocal critic of any human inroads into the environment who owns property in a sensitive stream environment zone? Or the loud critic of TRPA who has been cited for numerous serious environmental violations and refuses to correct them?

It’s time to give up the knee-jerk negative response to government in general and TRPA in particular and stop listening to these hypocrites. The RPU may not be a perfect plan, but it is a good one with enough checks and adaptability built in that if offers the best chance for a balance between humans and nature in the Lake Tahoe Basin.

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Bonanza Column 271 - Is the Fix In at IVGID?

I was in St. Louis all last week on business and so couldn’t attend the IVGID Board meeting that was on Wednesday, so I made a point of talking with some of the 60 or so people who did make it. I was surprised at the number of times that words like “disarray,” “chaotic,” and “silly” came up in accounts of the meeting.

Then I read the recap of the meeting in last week’s Bonanza, and I started to understand.

In what universe does filling the job of General Manager with an amateur, locally focused search make sense? IVGID has a budget of over $35 million and over 550 full and part time positions on its staff (both according to the 2012 – 2013 Budget Book). These 550 people range from seasonal life guards and ski instructors to highly skilled craftspeople, engineers, and professionals. Despite unfounded allegations to the contrary, the IVGID staff are top notch at what they do – that’s why we’ve had great people recruited away by Reno, Truckee, Washoe County, and others. It takes a top General Manager to lead top people. A weak leader will see the best people leave and the worst rise to new levels of mediocrity. We have been fortunate to have had such an General Manager for 11 years, and unfortunate in his decision to retire.

The General Manager manages the entire operation under policy set by the Board. The skill set of a GM or CEO from one industry to another is not interchangeable. It takes a very different CEO to lead a retail chain than it does to lead a worldwide non-profit, and than it does to lead a hotel chain, a financial institution, or a high-tech firm. Most times when a CEO was hired under the misguided notion that a good executive can lead anything, the results have not been good – think of Carly Fiorina, and John Sculley to cite two well-known examples.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of firms in a variety of industries that went through CEO successions. In almost every case, internal candidates were considered, and in absolutely every case an expert search firm was employed from the writing of the job description and qualifications through hiring. There is a profession called Public Administration. Its "fundamental goal... is to advance management and policies so that government can function." (Handbook of Public Administration) Colleges and Universities offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in Public Administration. Why? Because it is a professional discipline, and any professional discipline starts with study and is advanced through experience. Translating policy into execution and services for a municipality of 9,000 residents with a budget and staff like ours is not a job for even a very talented amateur, and we can’t afford to have someone learn on the job.

This is not a comment on the three people who were mentioned in the Bonanza story – I know and have worked with Claudia Andersen, Mike Brown, and Lynn Gillette and hold them in the highest esteem, and knowing the Hyatt organization’s standards, I have no doubt that Fred Findlen is very good at what he does. There are two problems with all these good folks: first, they have jobs to which they are dedicated, and second, they are not trained or experienced in public administration.

There is a rumor going around that the fix is in on the whole GM search, that the job description will be tailored toward a particular individual and the “search” will be a sham. I pray this is not true – if it turns out to be true, we are headed for a level of cronyism and incompetence in the governance of IVGID that has not been seen in my 17 years here and probably not ever. The job description will be the Board’s first opportunity to dispel this rumor – if it calls for a professional, experienced public administrator, then the rumor is clearly not true; if it is vague in regard to the parameters of the job, does not require more than generic credentials and experience, then the Board will have to answer some tough questions. Now this Wednesday’s Board meeting has been cancelled because “There are no matters requiring action by the board,” even though it was clearly stated at the last meeting that the job description would be on the agenda. So we will have to wait at least another two weeks to find out which way the wind is blowing on this one.

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