Practically everyone adapted rapidly in March and April.
In calls to municipal and county managers I asked, “How is the morale of your staff?” The answers reveal that public employees have made hundreds of adjustments, major and minor. It is becoming clear that aspects of the past 5 months reveal a new normal, including service delivery through remote work, figuring out how to manage dispersed teams of people, challenges staying connected as teams, challenges with finding camaraderie, dealing with agitated citizens, and living amid daily uncertainty. Shifting health orders require an above-average amount of problem solving. That can be rewarding and it can be exhausting. The conversations with managers are ongoing. Below are observations from Roaring Fork Valley managers.
Every manager I spoke with expressed pride and gratitude in how well their public workers have adapted, but there is also an undertone of concern best expressed by Clint Kinney, Manager of the Town of Snowmass Village who said in reference to both employees and citizens, “people are exhausted of trying to figure out how to be safe and do what they are doing.” He acknowledged that “it is going to be like this for a while. The gray is weighing on people.” Kinney noted that “the template for opening up was clear,” but in each department, with each situation, “the template for rolling back,” say if one police officer or a wastewater worker is exposed, or tests positive, or someone’s relative tests positive, “the next degree of nuance in defining what is safe and what is not” can’t be defined by rigid protocols. What if there are only two wastewater technicians? Should they ever be in the same room? He listed off a series of department-specific scenario questions which have no right answer.
That gray area also goes for businesses. In many places, municipal and county officials are getting closer to their business communities than ever before. In Aspen, City Manager Sara Ott, highlighted how her staff developed a “recovery streets plan” to extend businesses into the streets with accommodations for pedestrians and vehicles. Aspen already had a staff team that was a liaison to Main Street businesses. In a common refrain from other area governments, those people shifted roles to the “Health Protection Team” to help local businesses navigate public health orders from the County and State. Those relationships between the City and businesses will only be stronger after this.
Though many public workplaces have actively modernized workplace cultures through hiring, training and culture-conscious leadership, it is still true that people used to gravitate to the public sector because they valued service and certainty. The old saw was that they traded some opportunity and wages for that. If stability was the motivation of a public worker, a finance director, a clerk or a public works employee a decade or more ago years ago, someone who valued the clarity of a well-defined work silo with a 9-5 schedule without too many surprises, that model (which had already eroded) seems to have exploded during the response to this crisis. Many employees, and entire departments are doing work in emergency response that were never in their job descriptions. For some, this is extremely stressful. Public sector work right now is extremely dynamic, so much so that Pitkin County manager Jon Peacock said he is observing “response fatigue.” This is layered on “Zoom fatigue” and uncertainty fatigue. He attributes the layers of fatigue to a public sector climate from the national and state as well as local level that sometimes seems without leadership or strategy. People at all levels are figuring it out on the fly. It was a sentiment echoed by many others.
So much change, adaptation and uncertainty is harder on some than it is on others. City of Glenwood Springs Assistant Manager, Jenn Ooton spoke highly of Glenwood Springs staff who entered 2020 after a number of years of disruptive road projects, including the Grand Avenue Bridge which redirected traffic for many months. It was a project that involved the entire town staff at times. Staff were hoping that 2020 would be the year they could expect to get back to focusing on honing excellence. She noted that there are many “Type A” perfectionists in the organization who “have a high degree of pride in how we deliver services” who once again have had to “shift expectations.” At the time of this newsletter, the Grizzly Creek Fire has been burning a week, and a fire line has held at the bottom of No-Name Creek, less than a mile from Glenwood Springs. For Ooton, thinking of City employees, the fire is already having an impact, changing everything, and she too worries about crisis fatigue. The long term impacts on Glenwood and the Colorado River are just beginning to be recognized, as reported in the Colorado Sun. It does make one wonder about the long-term effects these layers of crisis will have on front-line public staffers.
Not all municipal cultures have been radically altered. Some have just taken the change in step and accepted some of the learned advantages. At the town of Basalt, Town Manager, Ryan Mahoney noted that their office culture has “returned to status quo, except for those who have daycare or childcare needs” who are now able to work half-time from home. Mahoney had high compliments for staff who “seamlessly” shifted to working for home for months, and Pam Schilling, Town Clerk, who pulled off an election during the first weeks of the pandemic. He also had praise for the innovations of TACAW, The Arts Campus at Willits, and the Basalt Chamber which shifted gears from a popular Wednesday summer concert series to “Wednesday Night Live in Basalt” which popped up around town. The street “Buskers” were the musicians previously booked for concerts who instead performed pop-up street performances in Willits or Historic downtown Basalt. The shifting locations prevented crowds and encouraged pedestrian street vitality for the struggling retail sector. It was a popular solution, and more generous to main street than the usual concerts in the park. That is the kind of adaptation that just might be around for a while.
For those on the front line of delivering public services, hang in there. You are doing such valuable work in very difficult circumstances. The crisis is far from a resolution. Most managers expressed that the health crisis and intertwined economic crisis were likely only 5 months into a 12 to 24-month cycle. Hang just keep on hanging in there, please.
