Author: Dr. Myles Riner
Forty-seven minutes into the January 31 IVGID Board meeting, Trustee Schmitz made an interesting comment when lamenting the inability to find more qualified applicants for General Manager (GM), and to have two who did initially apply eventually back out.
She pointed to the fact that this is “an opportunity for all of us to take a look in the mirror because if a candidate for GM were to Google our community right now, it doesn’t have a very friendly appearance.” I’m not sure you could say that Incline Village and Crystal Bay don’t come across as friendly, but it is certainly true that a candidate for GM who does a little digging would easily discover that:
- The majority of the Board has not been very friendly to IVGID management and staff;
- Several members of our community (the ‘Angry 8’, the ‘Perpetually Aggrieved’) have made disparaging comments and hurled unfounded accusations of fraud, malfeasance, and incompetence at IVGID at just about every Board meeting;
- Three IVGID Trustees have made and continue to make life difficult for several IVGID senior managers;
- Two Trustees are facing recall;
- A forensic audit witch hunt is underway; and
- Many IVGID staff members and managers have bailed on the District over the last few years, often citing a toxic work environment.
If that doesn’t give potential GM candidates pause, perhaps they might not be the right person for this job.
It also might be the case that the Board majority appears to be focused on finding someone with a business background to serve as GM, consistent with their belief that only someone who has run a business can successfully manage a government organization.
The problem is that a business faces its Board of Directors and stockholders; whereas a government agency is community-facing. Running a factory or an insurance company is not like running an Improvement District or managing a public utility. For example, a business might reconcile their accounts monthly; but government agencies usually do it twice a year. This does not make the government accounting staff incompetent. Piling on an understaffed finance department is never helpful, and those experienced in managing government agencies know this.
It’s not just what they say, but also how they say it.
The folks that need to take a good hard look in the mirror are not ‘all of us in the community’; but the small number of citizens who abuse the right to express their concerns at public meetings to fling their often inappropriate and tasteless and occasionally mean and vile invectives at the people who serve on our behalf, and the three Trustees who have enabled and even facilitated this abuse.
Jim Croley and I attempted to get these Trustees to adopt a code of conduct policy, consistent with Nevada Open Meeting Law, which would allow the Board to curb this abusive, disruptive, and uncivil behavior at Board meetings, and encourage them to tone down their criticisms and the rhetoric of their supporters in social media posts and other public forums. This was to no avail, and now the Board and our community are reaping the rewards.
It is the right, even the obligation, of members of our community and Trustees on the Board to identify problems and propose solutions when IVGID staff and management do not meet professional standards or provide high levels of service to our community. However, there are constructive ways to offer up this important feedback, and there are very destructive and grossly inappropriate ways to do so, and the latter does nothing but diminish the community and the District.
What these Trustees do also matters.
Likewise, snide comments, sly smirks, backhanded compliments, veiled threats, micromanagement, allegations of possible fraud by innuendo, and other actions by members of the Board do little to foster commitment and a sense of appreciation by staff for their work.
Those of us who attend, or watch, Board meetings have all seen this at one time or another. It is what we haven’t seen, and only heard about secondhand, that has caused the greatest damage to the morale of IVGID staff. Any mirror that accurately reflects that behavior should provide an easily understood explanation for the struggle to find candidates for the GM position.