Bob's Update - July 11, 2005
On balance, it was a pretty good week last week. It began
at a rapid pace, reached a couple of important milestones in the
ongoing process to find solutions to the problems we face in public
safety & justice at midweek and ended with - well it ended with
abundance.
As I told you in last week’s Update, we presented resolutions to the Board of Commissioners Ways & Means committee that will help create at least one feasible pathway for the changes that mean, literally, a safer, more just community. The resolutions, which allow us to take the very first legal steps to put in place critical upgrades to the jail and a new 14-A District Court location, were passed with a nearly unanimous endorsement by Ways & Means.
The following night, at the Working Session, the full Board discussed how we might move forward after an important presentation by Plante Moran. That report compares the way Oakland and Washtenaw counties contract for police services, and offered some new ideas that come with Oakland’s 15+ years of experience in providing superior public safety at an equitable rate to local jurisdictions in their county. With that analysis from Plante & Moran, along with Board discussion and several months of Community Conversation with local unit representatives, I have drafted a Modified Proposal on Contracting for Police Services.
The proposal will meet several of the townships’ concerns
about timing and methodology, but also assures the County will have
sufficient funds to meet the urgent need for jail expansion and court
safety.
During the next month, the Board of Commissioners will be holding a number of meetings with local city and township officials to discuss the modified proposal. The feedback from those discussions will help us understand how we can continue Washtenaw County’s superior public safety services with a fair distribution of the costs for those services.
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On Friday, at the Group of 180, we heard from Dr. Kim Cameron of the University of Michigan. Our County leadership became part of his research on “Positive Organizational Scholarship” when about 140 County employees took one of his surveys last month.
You may know of Dr. Cameron’s work; he spent some time with us at another 180 meeting last year. Basically, the thesis of what he calls an “Abundance model” is an organization that consciously and actively enables human excellence. You can perhaps imagine my enthusiasm for a model that pushes “positive deviance,” – the idea that we’re not here to do well, we’re here to do spectacularly. That we’re not here to do a good job –we just might be here to change the world.
You might also imagine how I felt later Friday morning when Dr. Cameron said, “It’s really an honor for me to talk with you. The scores from the survey tell us that this organization literally leads hundreds if not thousands of other public and private sector organizations in enabling spectacular performance.”
I shouldn’t be surprised at what you continue to do. But I
guess I just couldn’t help but be elated when I heard Dr. Cameron
compare us so favorably to the best Fortune top 20s, and some of the
country’s best known non-profit organizations. Measurements help. Last
week, with your help, we once again measured up to “world class”.
On balance, it was a pretty good week. I hope we both have another one.
