New city manager hits the ground running

Communication is her first focus

Jane Howington touched down on Montana soil just after 6:30 p.m. Monday.

By noon Wednesday, she had sat through a Kalispell City Council meeting, navigated a good portion of the city's streets, met with most of the city's officials, attended a KidSports meeting, checked into new living quarters, and started on one of her first orders of business.

"I need to bring forward some kind of communication tool with the public," the new city manager said, seated at her office table in City Hall. At her elbow was a welcome-to-Kalispell bouquet from the Chamber of Commerce.

Howington had heard a suggestion from council member Hank Olson Monday night that she consider doing a primer on just what a city manager's job entails, sort of a "City Manager 101." Howington's not venturing into that territory yet, but she is turning over possibilities for starting a dialogue between her office and the public.

"Communication is a big issue," she discovered after talking with dozens of people in a scant two days. She credited her predecessor, Interim City Manager Myrt Webb, with initiating a weekly communication with city staff to keep everyone on the same page. "So there's a process in place," she said.

But when pressed on what can be expected of her, fresh in from 160,000-population Dayton, Ohio, she likened it to a bank with its board of directors. The board determines specific goals, sets a plan for prosperity, and then the bank president figures out how to achieve those goals.

"It's very much the same here," Howington said, with the City Council in the role of the board of directors. "I, as the city manager, am the one to try to make those [directives' happen," working with a set of regulations and laws to "make this government, or this business, move forward."

She's still getting a sense of the team she's working with - department heads, support staff, fire and police officials, attorney and finance director and clerk - and learning their strengths, their expertise. Then, as marching orders come her way, "I'll take a look at how that goes and determine how to farm it out."

On second thought, she said, maybe a coach is a better comparison for her role.

"I could determine who's the best to go to bat," she said -how to put the resources, in this case the department heads and their staffs, to best use in their areas of expertise.

"The city manager is never going to have expertise in all areas," she said.

But, impressed as she has been with the expertise shown by Kalispell's department heads in the past month, she knows she'll be the one to track down the right staffer for each question facing the city.

Howington is spending the next couple of weeks in one-on-one meetings with department heads, getting their ideas and hearing their challenges. She's not proposing changes until later, but one idea that's percolating now is in the area of inspections.

"Fire inspections, building code inspections, they all come from different departments," she said.

From a citizen's perspective, she said, it makes more sense to handle the fire sprinkling requirements and building permit in the same stop. It's just an example of how thinking could be broadened, not a firm proposal.

"Maybe we need to do some better work with that, with how the messages get delivered to the citizens," she said.

Howington said she took another suggestion from Monday's council discussion in addition to the City Manager 101 idea.

The apportionment of salaries, charging percentages of salaries off to various funds that touch on their varying job duties, can get out of whack after a few years, she said. It can make sense to draw from different pots of money in one year with a healthy budget, but not so much a few years down the road.

"It would be good to go back and audit those to look at the incremental layers," she suggested. "If you don't bring them back into alignment," the apportionments may stay in place long after the logic has faded.

"It'll add a little more transparency," she said.

Fiscal matters for the city of Kalispell, in general, are not in the dire straits that popular opinion has slotted them, she's discovered.

"A lot of people are saying how horrible the financial situation is, and it actually isn't. We can pay our bills, we can write out a check We have the dollars. We've got to change the way we do business."

She wants a more fluid model to replace a rigid operating system, one that can help the city ride the ups and downs of the economy.

"We have good financial management, but we've got to create flexibility," she said. "We need to work with a fine-tooth comb and come up with creative ways to get that flexibility."

Howington has her own order of business lined out: Listen. Observe. Suggest. Take action.

She wants to work with the city's department heads on thinking beyond the old ways in order to see new efficiencies. She wants them to hold off on that "no" until they look at some other ideas.

It will be to their benefit, and to the city's, she said.

"The city manager's role is to make other people look good," she said, "and make the community look good."

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com