As an organization, we mourn the passing of Bill Horne, longtime (20-year) City Manager of Clearwater. Bill was a giant in the profession and, during his tenure, made a positive impact in so many of the circles in which he was involved. He was known to many by different titles, including family man, inspirational/faith leader, veteran, city manager, public administrator, mentor and friend. Even if you did not know Bill, let us use his life story as an example of how we should be living … always displaying integrity, driven to unselfish community service, inspired by faith, making an indelible impact on the people we serve and ultimately leaving the communities we serve in a much better condition at the end of our tenure. May we continue to keep his family and the Clearwater staff in our thoughts and prayers.
The notices for annual membership renewal will be sent out at the end of next month via regular mail and email. This is a great time for me to remind members of the numerous benefits of membership, including our strong code of ethics, opportunities for networking, training and development, advocacy of professional management, and support of the practitioners and the municipalities they serve. If you are aware of other professionals who would benefit from membership, feel free to invite them to contact a member of the Membership Committee, staff (or the website) for additional information.
The Association’s commitment to a strong code of ethics is evidenced by an annual requirement to complete a minimum of four hours of ethics training. This program year, the Professional Development Committee is planning another virtual, ethics-based Fall Symposium to assist in satisfying that requirement. We also traditionally offer ethics training as a pre-conference session at our annual conference, and our online library has several past webinars and ethics-based training events. As we mastered the virtual learning platform during the past year, many more ethics-based training opportunities have been made available from a variety of sources. If you have not already satisfied your annual ethics training requirement, now is a great time to plan on doing so.
We are mindful of the resurgence of the increasing COVID positivity rates in the state and try to balance that with plans for our future in-person activities. The various committees have been meeting to develop the program and speakers around these activities. Currently, the Winter Institute has made headway in planning an excellent in-person event in Cocoa Beach on February 3-4, 2022. The Conference Planning Committee has also started its efforts for next year’s Annual Conference in Orlando in June. However, the September 17th, District VI on-site training in Fort Myers (Topic: “Future Outlook: Trends Shaping Tomorrow’s Workforce) was rescheduled to April 8, 2022.
For most of us, the return to school signals the end of Summer, upcoming budget hearings and a return to normal fast-paced activities. I hope that over the summer break, each of you found some time to relax and recharge. If not, let’s try to be intentional about scheduling some downtime within the next few weeks.
