One Thousand New Jobs For Lakewood

[Bill Call]

One thousand new jobs in Lakewood paying $50,000 per year will generate $750,000 in new income tax revenue.

One three percent raise for city employees will cost the City $1,000,000 per year.

One rate increase in the City's hospitalization plan will cost the City $600,000 per year.

Over a two year period a small raise and a small increase in health insurance premiums will cost he City nearly 3.5 million dollars per year.

Does any one know how the City would pay for those increase? We all know the City (any City in this area) will not be adding 1,000 new jobs.

[Dan Slife]

Will we go into dept and borrow money against anticipated revenues rather than muster the balls to impose residency requirements, slash public servant pay/benies and radically restructure management and pay scale models?

[Mary Anne Crampton]

CitiStat is one tool our city is evaluating to increase efficiencies i.e. cost savings. Using this disciplined approach to government operations, Baltimore has increased responsiveness to its residents and saved over $24 million in overtime. For its efforts and for its success, Baltimore won the Innovation in Government Award from Harvard last year.

The "experts" do not tout CitiStat as a panacea, but the process potentially offers the means to significant progress in our journey towards financial stability. Because the approach requires a cultural shift in the way we do business at City Hall, top-down commitment is critical...the process won't work without it. Can CitiStat work in Lakewood?

I encourage Observers to attend the upcoming LakewoodAlive forum on CitiStat, next Thursday, Oct. 13. The chief of staff for the Baltimore Department of Transportation is our featured speaker. Also, Andy Boyd, a consultant who has been retained by the City of Lakewood, will talk about the economic development implications of CitiStat.

This is leading edge stuff of interest to government officials across the region - and the world. Be there.

Mary Anne

[Lynn Farris]

Sounds interesting Mary Ann. Thanks for sharing.

[Jim O'Bryan]

Bill

One of the refreshing things I have found out about Vic Nogalo at City Hall is that he has a very realistic view of the region. I found it refreshing to find at least one person in government that understands industry is not coming back to the region in our lifetime.

However as Dan points out, Vic along with many others in decision making places at City Hall, Police, Fire and the School Board do not live in Lakewood. This underlines that they do not have to LIVE with their decisions. Instead of residency requirements I prefer to go with Ed Favre's and Grow Lakewood's concept of incentives, while offering a hiring practice like civil service that offers enough points for living in Lakewood that it becomes a necessity.

But as always you are da Man with numbers, reflections and serious topics. Lakewood is much richer for having the Calls in the house.


.

[Kenneth Warren]

Here is a look at the CitiStat application in Baltimore.

http://www.ci.baltimore.md.us/news/citi ... s2004.html

You may see the various departments - from housing and parks to wastewater and fire.

Here is a Fire Department report.

http://www.ci.baltimore.md.us/news/citi ... 041105.pdf

Kenneth Warren

[Mark Crnolatas]

A tad off the bigger picture, I wanted to highlight one reason our police officers might want to live outside of where they work. They do deal with violent people, criminal minds of varying degrees, from drunks to drug dealers to psychological disturbed. They too, have families, kids who want to play outside, wives who shop. Our city is compact in square miles relative to the population. It is different from Cleveland, where a police officer who works 4th, 5th or 6th Districts (eastern areas of Cleveland) would prefer to live in 1st district ( West Park area). That is a large area away from where he or she is seen day to day doing their duties. Border to border, our city obviously can't compare.

While I agree that some city employees might be able to serve the city better by living within it's laws, taxes, and perspectives, I believe our police officers might be given some other options, such as a geographical limit etc.

Mark Allan (Crnolatas)
"A society or group of people exist soley in it's ability to maintain an atmosphere of peace and civility. It's failure is directly relative to the degree of the lack of these conditions".

[Jim O'Bryan]

Mark

I have spoken with various police about this including Mike Flynn and Ed Favre, none can ever remember an incident where a policeman that lived in Lakewood was hassled by any person they had arrested. If anything the opposite is true.

I can only go by my self experiences, and I know when I worked in Chagrin Falls and lived in Lakewood I was always a little antsy when it got to 4 o'clock and I knew I had a 1 hour drive home, or started to think about a dinner engagement I had and could not be late for.

Look at the flip-side. The mayor and every member of council is not only a resident but by regulation have to be available through the phone book 24/7/365. Certainly everything you mention could be a problem for them. Yet because of their love and dedication to the city they serve and live in.

[Mark Crnolatas]

Ah, well that's good to hear. My comment is based on views by some Cleveland police officers, and those of a couple of other cities.

Mark
_______________________
"A society or group of people exist soley in it's ability to maintain an atmosphere of peace and civility. It's failure is directly relative to the degree of the lack of these conditions".

[Mark Timieski]

I read the editorials in the PD religiously. There have recently been a number of editorials written by Cleveland police railing the residency requirements. The picture that I get from reading these editorials is that these particular officers are “keepers at the zooâ€Â￾. I don’t think this is a healthy situation for the officers or the residents.

One reason for the residency requirement is for the city to have tax access to the income, but there are other reasons. Having city employees in the city should help build an active and secure community, if the employees take a positive role in the city. I’m thinking that requiring residency can be counter productive (at least by the editorials I see in the PD).

I would hope that there could be some strong motivation for employees to live here, but not a requirement. Does the income tax structure support living and working in Lakewood? Could the tax structure be biased? Could pay be biased? Preferential treatment?

I was on the Grow Lakewood committee, I’m part of the source for the incentive idea. We asked Ed Favre about the issue of living and working in the city. I seem to remember him saying that in his long career he had only encountered one problem, but that the issue would have played out the same even if he hadn’t lived in Lakewood.

To the original question, if the city employees get a cost of living increase, doesn’t this tend to reflect the cost of living increases that the residents see? The issue would be if the city employee cost of living increases outpace private sector cost of living increases. I realize that the healthcare costs are a real issue, as these increases seem to have no end. Healthcare costs do not have a balancing mechanism coming from the private sector.

[Mark Crnolatas]

It might be, that my post did not match my intended point. I was pointing out the views of quite a few Cleveland police officers that we've known, but it appears that the viewpoint and situation of those officers are not the same as the officers that Jim spoke to. I haven't talked to any LPD officers about this subject, so I probably should have reserved my comment until I had.

[Jim O'Bryan]

Mark

Let's work this one through. You are talking about an arresting officer possibly getting hassled, or stalked by someone they arrested at an earlier time. Correct?

If that is the case there are laws that address this problem, and who would be better handled to react to this than a police officer?

Let's work the equation backwards. Do we want Lakewood to have less safety forces living here because it makes criminal uneasy or might make they commit crimes against the police?

When I was a kid there was a policeman that lived in Lakewood, patrolled Lakewood, and owned a pet shop in the city. He was also one of the most loved and respected members of the community. Likewise Mike Flynn arrested more than a handful of people, and to this day you can see Mike and his wife walking the streets while really enjoying his Lakewood life. Today he is in housing enforcement, another position that could lend itself to the same problems he might of had being a policeman in Lakewood, and it would seem not to slow him down on nightly walks around town. I know of people he has arrested that look forward to running into him and invite him on the porch for a little reminiscing and talk about where the city was and where it is headed.

Which part of Cleveland is safest? I have always been told West Park. Which would be do in part to the high concentration of police and fire that live in the area, I would think.

Again not having access to the numbers right now, but I thought I had heard that 75% of the safety forces live out of town. Forget the tax dollars, but would not these people living in Lakewood add to the bottom line of security?

When I have spoken to movers and shakers in town about residency requirements, they all seem universally opposed, but embrace a concept of incentives. Most of these involve housing or other creative methods like Community Currency.

I think as petro-chemical products come to an end in the next 10-15 years this point might become moot.

[Bill Call]

I have always been opposed to residency requirements, until recently.

Since the City is generally unwilling to provide solid financial information regarding expenditures what follows is based on guesstimates.

The average city employee costs the city nearly $65,000 in wages and benefits. There seems to be no real desire to control those costs.

The average city resident makes $32,000 per year. Most work for private companies. Most have seen a year or two without raises, taken pay cuts, increased health insurance costs and loss of pensions.

It seems only City employees are immune from economic reality.

In talking with with City employees I have heard variations of this response more than once:

"Fuck Lakewood, I don't give a god dam about Lakewood I don't live in Lakewood."

Maybe its time to consider a residency requirement.

[Grace O'Malley]

Imposing a residency requirement will not be a quick fix. You cannot impose the rule retroactively upon existing employees, so they will be "grandfathered" and exempt. The rule will apply only to future hires.

It certainly is worth considering as a strategy, as long as this lag is acknowledged.

[Donald Farris]

Hi,
I'm usually on the side of less government, but here I shift. I agree with both comments from Mr. O'Bryan and Mr. Call. Those are 2 pluses to requiring safety forces to live in Lakewood. And also, with Ms. O'Malley, of course this type of change would need to be grandfathered in (with the possible except of the heads).

A third reason I'm for it is, like Mr. O'Bryan's point, an issue of safety. Not day-to-day safety as Mr. O'Bryan pointed (which is a compelling reason) but rather safety of our city in a real emergency. Like that massive blackout we had last year. I had to drive across town to get home and it was tricky and time consuming. If our safety forces live in Lakewood, it would be easier and quicker for them to assist Lakewood in the event of a real emergency. If they live in Strongsville they may not be able to get to Lakewood in time to help and may prefer to stay at home and help there (as may of the New Orleans safety forces did in their recent disaster). If they live and work in Lakewood there would not be this type of internal conflict.

I do want to say I am quite proud of every one that choses this career and I haven't met one of them that sees their function as a 9 to 5 type of job.