Don't Be Totally Honest, Green Cove Admin Tells City Council
Communications Memo Screams Out, 'You Are a Rubber Stamp'
This story is opinion, informed by having reported on city councils in four states and having advised candidates for municipal office.
The City of Green Cove Springs is showing its true colors with new guidelines for how city councilors1 should deal with the public. The guidance actually discourages members of the elected body from having honest conversations with constituents.
The memo from the city’s administration is to be presented to the City Council at its Tuesday night meeting.
“Communicating with the Public Guidelines” starts out innocuosly enough with a primer on Florida law, then segues to the kind of advice mom would give about dealing with difficult people. One suspects these sections were intended to work like the cheese wrapped around your dog’s pills from the vet. This was the pill:
City Council Members are encouraged to avoid sharing their personal opinions on City Council decisions when interacting with the public, as the Council is perceived as a unified body by the community.
This point of view profoundly misrepresents the principles of representative government. Voters choose councilors to provide oversight of the city bureaucracy on their behalf. Fobbing off their duty to speak to voters candidly (in service of a “perception” of unanimity) is a horrible look. It is tantamount to saying that the council exists only to rubber stamp decisions by the city manager.
Asked for a reality check from someone who has attended many city council meetings, it was explained to me that such a policy indeed makes sense, given an obvious stupidity, lack of preparedness or just plain laziness of the average city councilor.
That notion should be rejected, not necessarily because the characterization is untrue or exaggerated, but because even if these people were as hapless as described, it is still their duty to openly discuss the business of government with the people that live here. Moreover, their duty is to do more than listen. It is their duty to take their constituents’ concerns to the council as a whole and to professional city staff.
Not quite as awful was advice to “avoid commitments: They should not promise specific outcomes or take actions they do not have the authority to implement individually.”
Yeah, no.
In the face of a genuine concern voiced by citizens, a councilor can commit him or herself to persuade at least two more councilors to defeat a bad idea by a 3-2 majority.
The policy repeatedly urges councilors to encourage disgruntled residents to attend city council meetings themselves and make their opinions heard, which sounds pretty good in theory but it runs up against a historical reality: You go, you say your piece and nothing happens.
“Letting off steam” is what we call that, forgeting that this also means lost energy. You will spend your time before the lectern—on their turf—giving voice to some level of injustice, usually without any give-and-take with the decisionmakers. The mayor apparently has some ability to turn this event into a dialogue, but it is not guaranteed.
It should be enough for you or a group of neighbors to go to a councilor or two and convince them of the righteousness of your cause. Then, it should be the job of those representatives to put the issue on the council agenda and lobby their colleagues for a solution.
You should ask your councilor, “When was the last time a resident or a group of residents making their case at a council meeting actually changed the course of a vote or a city policy?” Wait, wait that might devolve into that councilor having to voice an opinion…
But, if he or she did, the answer might be, “not in living memory.” Or maybe it would be the time during the Covid 19 epidemic in which the council split on a proposed mask mandate. Maybe that counts.
Longtime residents have totally dismissed the efficacy of “bringing the fight to city hall” because its a sucker’s game. Talking to local folks over many years, so many have said the same thing about the City Council: “They just do whatever they want.”
The new communications policy includes several cute little examples of constituent questions and suggested responses, all begun with the feigned empathy of a call center: “Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” “I appreciate your feedback on this policy” and “Thank you for your interest.”
Examples
Here’s an alternate example, fictional but based on not-so-distant history.
The code enforcement guy was walking around my backyard unannounced, and, when the dog started barking, he threatened to shoot her. Then, he berated my wife in front of my nine-year-old.
Response: “This is the tenth complaint I’ve heard about this guy this month. If it were me, I’d want to kill him, but instead I’m going to go to the city manager and insist that dude gets fired, and maybe whoever it was that checked this guy’s references from his last job in South Florida.”
Defective by Design
One of the reasons that Green Cove has such a weak council is structural.
There are five numbered seats which means there are five elections, but the councilors serve at-large. That is, every councilor represents all 11,000 Green Covians. I’m not sure if Florida allows it, but another way at-large districts do it elsewhere is to have a single election for all five seats and give each voter five votes. Top five vote-getters take office. One election. Bam. It’s over with. Money saved.
The most democratic way, of course, is to have real districts. That is, numbered seats would correspond to a geographic district in the city, ideally representing about 2,200 people.
Green Cove Springs has managed to combine the worst characteristics of the available options: Individual numbered seats without giving voice to neighborhoods, combined with an at-large system that incentivizes unanimity in voting yes, as if every initiative coming from the city managers office were immaculately conceived.
So rare is a dissenting vote in Green Cove that I once wrote a story about one of the times it happened.
Back to the city’s flawed representative structure.
A perfectly good compromise would be to establish a combination system with three geographic districts and two at-large seats. That would give distinct sections of the city their own seat at the table, as it were, while leaving two positions to represent the whole.
Under the current system, it is actually possible for all five councilors to be from Magnolia Point, our gated, golf-course community. Does anyone think that’s a good thing? At least, using the combo system, Magnolia Point could only rule the roost with a max three out of five.
Strong Mayor?
There’s another possible alternative to the alternative. As it now stands, the city rotates the job of mayor among its members like a participation trophy. There is some talk of a “strong mayor.” That is, a system where the mayor is a standalone elected position with real administrative authority.
I’m not sure how that works in the context of having a city manager, but to me it only makes sense if the manager’s position were abolished and department heads reported directly to the mayor. This would call for a high level of administrative competence in candidates for this office.
The current manager is making about $180,000 a year. Perhaps, candidates for mayor would be willing to work for less—say a third to a half of that. Does the person in charge of a place with only 11,000 people, one major intersection, a pier and pool really need to earn more money than the governor of Florida?
What does this have to do with City Council communication? Maybe if the mayor and city councilors were scrappier—a team of rivals, as Lincoln once saw it—the result would be better representation for the ordinary folk that live and pay taxes here.
The use of councilor instead of councilman or councilwoman—or the inelegant “council member”—is better because its not gender specific without being woke. The word has been around for hundreds of years and it is defined as “one who sits on a council.”