Republic City Administrator David Cameron spoke to me about city government’s response to the coronavirus shutdown and how the new health guidelines have changed how the city does business. Despite big changes in the way the city operates, Cameron said maintaining a sense of community is “paramount” to its approach. (Note: I’ve edited the conversation lightly for length and clarity.)
How are you keeping city government running with all the limitations that you have to face?
The very next day after the NBA and the NCAA did their shutdown, I called a special meeting with all of our staff. And basically we began to say, ‘How do we conduct meetings if we had to go online – even with the City Council?’ All my financial staff, HR staff, even some of the billing staff are remote working in our system. They can get into certain protected accesses, and so it’s business as usual. We’re still paying our bills. We’re receiving. The operation continues.
The biggest thing that we did to help comply with the social distancing aspects of it was we started staggering our public work schedule. So crews would come in in the morning (and) set up orders. We still have new people and residents coming in and setting up utility services and things of that nature. So we had to find a way for people to pay their bills online (and for) our crews to go out and establish them. We’re still reading meters. They’re just on staggered schedules and they’re keeping those social distances in place.
I think the biggest impact was in our Parks and Recreation Department, where we had to suspend all of our activities. But we’ve not really seen a decline in our volume of work and the output of our work from our staff.
How do all the requirements around public openness and accountability … affected what kinds of things you’ve been able to do or how you’ve been able to meet the challenges?
I’ve got to commend the IT staff and those that put it together. The state attorney general came out with guidance a couple of weeks ago … for how to comply with the Sunshine Law. So you can still conduct business with your city councils and take a roll call vote as long as there is teleconferencing. And so basically their picture has to be there. It has to be shared so you can confirm that it’s them. So two weeks ago, we conducted our city council meeting and we were able to conduct business via Zoom.
We actually have a meeting … Tuesday night that we’re going to be doing. We share those on our social media page and in our website. We have to make those available to the public. It also allows for citizens to call in and we can actually take public comment. They can ‘raise their hand’ and then we can unmute their phone and actually take their public comment about something they want to discuss with the city.
Do you think some of these things that are being implemented, not just by you, but by other governments, will carry over and change some of the ways you do things in the future?
In the city, we’ve been working on allowing employees to remote work and there’s always been a debate of how you do that. But I do believe there’s going to be a somewhat of a paradigm shift or a transition into working from home. I think it will change the way we do business. But I also think we’re seeing more and more people now, especially in this, you’re seeing more people pay their bill by phone and online.
Even our meetings, and allowing the public to engage in what we’re doing social media-wise or online, I think that will carry on for a while. We’ve been talking about it inside the organization that we believe that just due to this event, it may very well change the shape of how we’re discovering that we can do business. It’s really tested us, but it’s also opened the door to the opportunity to say, ‘You know what? This is a good test and it’s working.’
You mentioned Parks and Rec. Are there one or two other departments that have faced particular challenges? I think police and fire are obvious, but what are some of those challenges?
We’ll start with public safety. So on the police and fire side, obviously there’s a need for personal protective equipment. It’s definitely changed the way we do it. They’re taking different questions on a 911 call. They’ll ask you more and more things about that call before we actually send out police and fire instead of a medic. In Republic, what most people don’t understand is when someone dials 911 for a medical emergency, it’s usually the Fire Department that shows up first before the ambulance does. So given the nature of this, you have to change the dynamic, especially on domestic calls. We’re encouraging officers to do it a different way. Don’t go inside the home if you don’t have to. Ask the residents to come outside, things of that nature. The priority is just protecting public safety, and not so much all of the enforcement. You’ve got to take a completely different approach to just making sure you’re keeping people safe and distancing.
What our public safety is not out doing is looking for ways to enforce these orders. I think there’s been a big misunderstanding. This is probably the most disappointing part of all this, is that we’ve fielded a number of calls of people saying, ‘Am I going to get arrested or am I going to get fined if I go to the grocery store?’ There’s no provision in anything that we’ve discussed or put out that even suggests that our officers are even out looking for that. It’s more about public safety in general. Please don’t worry about going out to the store. are obviously the front line. They’re going out there, and we monitor those things. Making sure that they have the right equipment to do the job is important.
The other aspect is community development. We still have development going on and there’s still building taking place. People are coming in, applying for permits. We’ve got large-scale developments that we’re working with right now. So with them … Zoom meetings with development and architects and engineers for their buildings, so that they continue to move forward. So building has not stopped. Housing developments have not stopped. We’re still doing inspections every day. It’s just all of our business office hours and locations are closed, but we’re allowing people to apply for their permits, do everything online, pay for it online – which we were already doing before, it’s just had to get a little bit more enhanced.
How much leeway or how much responsibility do the individual departments have for setting their own procedures? How are you coordinating that? Is it all centralized and handed down, or what’s the breakdown there?
We already had every Tuesday in the city…an Executive Leadership Team meeting where we used to get together. Now we just have that meeting via Zoom, and we coordinate who’s doing what. Before spring break ever hit, everyone presented what their staggered work or their online presence would be. And so that was all established. Who was going to be working in the billing office? Who was going to be answering the phone? All that was done before we … had to say, ‘Okay, we’re not going to get to be in a room together now for quite some time. And we don’t know when that’s going to be.’
For example, this week, I’ll give you a prime example of that. We started finding more and more people there was not someone to answer the phone when they called City Hall, which was a little bit of a shock, because we believed we had that in place. It would roll over to someone’s cell phone. We still want people, when they dial that number … to get somebody. Well, it wasn’t happening. And so they’re still working on that. So we’re finding things that may be falling through the cracks a little bit, because we still want to maintain that customer service presence.
You’re obviously changing the way you do a lot of the same things that you did before. Are you doing any new things now that you weren’t doing three weeks ago? Are there actual new services that you find the city’s having to provide or or offer because of this?
I’d just say that we have gotten extremely creative to say, ‘Okay, we’re not going to come out with the heavy hand. We’re trying to find ways to make it easier and relaxing. The best one that came out … was from Jared Keeling and his team. They came out with a program to do 20 miles in 20 days, and people could sign up. It’s not necessarily a fundraiser. It’s just a thing that says everybody gets a shirt and everybody get out and separate, and do 20 miles in 20 days. That’s been our whole thing behind it. We wanted to change the messaging – instead of putting out all the closures of the city and rehashing all these shutdowns or mandates.
We didn’t issue the word emergency. We’re a charter city, so, you know, that’s the county. The state has one. The national level had one. We just said, ‘Hey, follow those guidelines.’ But at the same time, we’re like, ‘Let’s quit talking about what we’re shutting down. Let’s talk about what people can do to be active. Let’s find new and creative ways to do that.’
In government, you have to have financial internal controls with how you spend your money. So we’ve had to find new ways to make sure that any purchase … still got its checks and balances, and it’s still going through three people. Both myself and the mayor are starting to get financials online that people are scanning from their home. We’re actually saying, ‘We can give these approvals and it has not slowed down our business.’
We’ve had to think outside the box. But it’s not me. It’s the team of people that are like, ‘Hey, I got an idea – let’s do it this way.’ I’ll say that there’s not been one service interruption in the way we would normally do business. The most difficult part is not being able to have follow-up questions. My (Executive Leadership Team) meetings online have gone from … an hour to… 35 to 40 minutes. You lose that interaction.
What’s the city’s role in keeping that sense of community beyond just government, in the things like Parks and Rec is doing … when everybody’s isolated?
It’s paramount. We started talking about Have a Blast. We’re heavily reliant upon sales tax, and so obviously those are going to take significant hits. And so we’ve actually redone our entire budget that’s going to be presented Tuesday night. But one of the things that we were adamant about was maintaining every social program, including Have a Blast. So people are like, ‘Wait a minute. We need money. Why would you blow up a bunch of fireworks?’ The point of it is we’re very community-minded in the programs that we do. To me, even if we have to wait until the third week in July or the first week of August, we want to have that event to bring the community together.
We don’t want to lose sight of the fact that we’re going to get through this, and we’ve got to continue to communicate that, because everyday all you hear about is the trends – the negative, the negative, the negative, the shutdowns. But … we’ll get through this and we don’t want to lose sight that we have a community that we want to help spur and lead.
When people ask me, ‘What is the brand of Republic?’ I’d say we’re very community-minded. Between, Have a Blast, Mud Run, Tiger Tri, Pumpkin Daze – that’s stuff that not everyone’s doing anymore. And so for us, it’s a calling card of (the) community that we want to be. This community pays an extra amount of taxes that funds into the aquatic center, the community center, and our park systems. We’ve expanded our trail system and we’ve committed more funds to it. So it’s … paramount to us to bring the community together when we can, or to find ways for them to do it.
If somebody says ‘What are you doing to be fiscally responsible?’ we’ve obviously had to suspend a number of positions. We’re going to suspend a number of capital projects for the interim, just to see how this flushes out. But the city has been very proactive with our financial position for the last several years. I believe that we’ve got the ability to … not lose or have to lay off or furlough or do anything like that, and to keep our team intact. And that’s been the priority from day one. They’re the ones that make it happen, and that’s been the priority.
We have to cut , and we have, but we don’t have to cut people. We can hold off hiring vacant positions. We’re all going to kind of pitch in, including myself. There are just certain tasks that we weren’t normally doing before that we’re going to have to do, just to make sure the job still gets done. But the objective is not to create an impact to our residents and just ride out the storm. It’s going to take a while for the economy to recover and no one has a crystal ball to that. but our message is, ‘We’ve got a plan. We’ve been working on that plan, and we’re going to implement that plan, and we believe the best is still yet to come. And we’re going to rise out of it be stronger and better. And we’ve got new ideas and new things going on. My staff is fully engaged… they’re working very hard and I love it.