It is truly an honor to serve as your President for the next year, and I appreciate the trust you have placed in me to lead the association. I have been a member of FCCMA for over twenty years, and I am truly excited about the future of the association and some of the initiatives we have included in our most recent strategic plan update. I would like to share with you six priorities that we can focus on together that I believe will make a real difference in the association and for its members.
Two of the priorities are continuations of projects that started a year or two ago, but each one is no less important than when we started them. The first of these is the Professional Management Matters campaign, which will now be led by a standing committee. I want to thank Russ Blackburn and Jim Hanson for their continued leadership and support in this effort. We have one region of the state covered with an ambassador team now, whose outreach efforts should really help in making sure our target audiences understand the difference that professional management makes every day. We will be developing and launching more regions, and increasing our messaging – I hope you’ll work with these ambassadors as we place them across the state. Our efforts complement the ICMA “Life, Well Run” campaign.
Secondly, I am excited about continuing our work with the Florida Local Government Coalition, created during Carl Harness’ presidency. This coalition combines the power of 28 statewide associations with nearly 200,000 members to achieve its mission which is to communicate the value of local government, strengthen member associations, and create a network of support for local government issues. This year, the Coalition was instrumental in the design of the Winter Institute, and also helped with the content of this conference. Additionally, we held two successful regional meetings with the Coalition in the Tampa and Orlando areas. I hope that you will join me in encouraging your department directors and key staff to get involved in the Coalition’s efforts; and that you’ll also promote and support Local Works Day each October.
Additionally, I need to mention that at the urging of Senator Bob Graham, and in concert with over 100 statewide organizations that came together in February to help improve the civic life of Florida’s communities, the Florida Benchmarking Consortium, the Lou Frey Institute, and the Bob Graham Center have partnered to form a new Community Civic Indicators Initiative. The Initiative’s goal is to create a set of balanced indicators, to be collected by local governments, as a vehicle to measure Civic Engagement in Florida on the local level. This new Initiative will provide us, as managers and our elected officials, with the information we need to monitor and understand citizen engagement in our communities and to lead the development of collaborative networks that can strengthen the fabric of our civic culture in every region of the state. I applaud this effort. At a time when it seems the consequences of a lack of community connectivity and positive citizen involvement fills our nightly news every week, the Community Civic Indicator Initiative could not be more timely or important.
In addition to continuing those efforts with Professional Management Matters and the Florida Local Government Coalition, I would like to focus on four additional areas:
Diversity and Inclusion – I am creating a new standing committee and I know I have the board’s full commitment to continue to work on the issue that Jill brought forward one year ago. I am asking every city and county to work on this issue as a top priority; as Jill said, it is the right thing to do.
The FCCMA Student Council – Within the FCCMA Professional Development Committee is a student council, and now that we have ICMA student chapters at several universities, I want to host a one-day session of all the chapters and the members of the subcommittee. I want them to meet each other, share their ideas, and build upon the work students are doing with each chapter. Plus, I want to make sure each chapter is properly funded for its commitment to ICMA, and that each chapter is fully supported by its university. These chapters host the future talent of our association and serve as an important link to the profession within the academic community. I am also pleased that Dr. T. Wayne Bailey is here as it gives me a chance to announce that Stetson University is offering a Public Management Degree starting this fall. I would ask that you support them in this endeavor to help prepare our next generation of managers.
Growing the next generation –Several years ago, the Volusia and Space Coast managers partnered together to offer multi-city internships. The FCCMA joined this effort by paying for the intern to attend the annual conference. When the recession hit, the program went away – and I believe we now need to bring it back. I will be working with the board of directors to develop a paid Internship program, one in which we either have multiple cities, or cities and a county joining together for a one-year position. When we compared FCCMA to some of the other state associations we found that some of them support as many as four of these each year – that is a huge commitment to make to one’s membership. We have a lot to explore and design. We say we want to grow the next generation of city and county managers: we must be prepared to put resources behind that commitment. I am also pleased to announce that our President-Elect Bobby Green is committed to preparing our next gens by focusing next year’s conference on preparing our next generation.
Finally, we need to focus on Member Outreach with an emphasis on counties. I want to spend some time this year attending your regional meetings as managers, like the Space Coast, Sun Coast, and Broward manager meetings to see what we can do to engage our county managers, administrators, deputies and others on the county management team. With 45 of the 67 counties having a commission-manager form, we frankly are not doing well as an association with membership from each of these counties. We can do better; we must do better; and we will do better. I got my start in county government under the leadership of Dr. Tom Kelly, Dick Kelton and Larry Arrington and have always been grateful for their emphasis on the profession and this association. I also want to thank Lee Niblock, Alachua County Manager, for personally contacting county managers this year on behalf of FCCMA. I will work with each district director to help grow our county membership – and look forward to making sure that FCCMA addresses and includes county issues in everything we do.
