Nuts and Bolts

If our Municipal Election is held as scheduled – a big IF this morning – we are now only 39 days away from selecting a new Mayor and (hopefully mostly) new City Council. Most of the mayoral candidates have by now issued some kind of campaign platform, laying out what they believe are the important issues and how each of them are uniquely suited to solve Trenton’s problems.

I say “most” because of the six people running for mayor, five are running campaign websites or hosting other presences on social media. Only Oliver “Bucky” Leggett appears to be missing any presence online. There is nothing that I can find or have seen from the man or about him. He has been pretty good at maintaining an extremely low profile during this election so far.

Considering that the man has been invisible in this city since his last election loss to Doug Palmer in 2002, I’d say he’s certainly staying in character. That is inexcusable in a candidate to replace Tony Mack. I hope we are racing for the top this year, and not the bottom.   There is not one single thing to recommend Bucky Leggett as our next mayor, so I will not say one more word about him for the remainder of this election unless he can present some ideas and plans.

After the last four years, we hardly need any more reminders about how bad things have gotten around here. But over the last few days, we have seen two more stories about the abysmal state into which the City of Trenton has fallen.

Yesterday, the Trenton Times reported that the NJ Department of Community Affairs (DCA) has criticized the city for the many extreme delays and bottlenecks in its contracting process. “The city needs to find a way to address bids on a more timely basis,” DCA told us in February, as they were asked to green-light proposals for projects based on bids and proposals several months old and, in the term used by the state, “stale.”

Wednesday, in another Trenton Times article, we read that due to years of delayed or faulty maintenance the Trenton Water Works (TWW) loses a full 28 percent of the water it pumps every day from the Delaware River to leaks on its way from the source to the faucets and pipes of the utility’s business residential customers around Mercer County.

And another article yesterday, this one in the Trentonian about TWW describes the great difficulties the utility is having just recruiting and training qualified service personnel from the City of Trenton.

These stories show just how bad the normal, everyday, basic but essential functions performed by the City have become. By no means, however,  are all of these problems the sole responsibility of the former disgraced Administration of the former felonious Occupant, although he and his cronies greatly accelerated trends that pre-dated them.

These stories show just how acute these problems have become. The City’s failures to properly manage its contracting and purchasing systems will mean a further deterioration in the city services we still receive; they will be harder to deliver and more expensive. And experiencing yet more problems at the Water Works further strengthens the argument that TWW is too important to the public health and economic life of Mercer County to leave it in the hands of a bumbling, in competent City of Trenton. As I have said for most of the last four years, we are in danger of losing city control of the utility and the income it provides for this broke town unless we can clean up our act!

So, we are 39 days from the election. Who among our Mayoral candidates acknowledges how significant the problem of providing essential yet routine city services has become? Who has the best feel for the nuts and bolts of running a small Northeastern post-industrial city?

Not many, I’m sorry to say.

We’ve already dismissed Leggett. Let’s continue with the candidateI most recently discussed, current Council Member Kathy McBride. Turns out she is the easiest one to talk about, because she says so little on her website about the problem.

On the Platform page of her website, she fails to discuss any issues having to do with Trenton’s city government. The closest she comes to the subject is to talk about “Infrastructure.” This is her platform plank on the subject, in its entirety:

Kathy believes that infrastructure investment will enhance the quality of life for Trenton residents, and create safe, clean and aesthetic neighborhoods. As Mayor Kathy will…

• Re-build city bridges
• Repair damaged roads

And that’s it. She doesn’t explain how she will do this: she doesn’t explain any financing for this, any timeline for this, any sets of priorities for this, or even whether she believes this work will be done by city employees or contractors. It comes across, as does most of her platform, as a set of buzz words offered to allow her to say that she has a “plan” for her mayoralty, but without suggesting that she knows anywhere near enough about the problems themselves in order to offer credible solutions.

Based on this, do I believe Ms. McBride would be able to untangle the mess in our contracting and purchasing functions? No way.

How about Walker Worthy? His platform does contain a section labeled “Governance,” although it describes several laudable objectives very general in nature: “operate a clean, honest , transparent government;” appointing competent Cabinet members (what a novel idea! and how sad that such a thing has to be explicitly stated); talk to the State about restoring significant and permanent revenue flows to the city in the form of Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTS); stabilize city property taxes; “restore revenue generating departments,” such as Inspections and Parking Enforcement.

These are all good objectives, but I don’t get a sense that Mr. Worthy has a real road map in mind on how to get there. Along with his other areas of concern – “Jobs and Economy” (discussed by me here), “Education,” and “Crime and Public Safety” – Mr. Worthy displays a pretty good sense of what needs to be done. I just don’t think he knows how to go about it.

Paul Perez’s platform is slimmer than Mr. Worthy’s, although he has a few more concrete ideas about city operations:

• Provide professional development programs for City Hall employees that includes performance measurement, supervision and leadership training.

• Create an Office of Integrity and Accountability responsible for oversight of city programs and combat Fraud, Waste and Abuse.

• Restore the public’s trust through transparency that promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what the city is doing.

Mr. Perez is getting a little closer to the mark. But these and his other platform proposals, while good and desirable, sound to me awfully generic. For instance, in what town would citizens NOT want to “Transform City Hall into a customer friendly operation?”  Where would a city NOT want to “Provide professional development programs for City Hall employees?”

The main criticism I have of Mr. Perez is that as a recent returnee to the City, he is not familiar enough with the particulars of our specific situation and our specific problems to be able to effect meaningful solutions. As a manager with long and distinguished service in the Federal government, is his experience and training in environments as vast as the Federal bureaucracy truly appropriate for the small scale of our city’s operation? Local government, after all, is not simply a scaled-down US Government; it is an entirely separate world with real-life constraints that an executive manager whose nearly entire career with the Feds might not be well-equipped to handle, frankly.

Take, for instance, his proposal for an Office of Integrity and Accountability. That his remedy for the rampant corruption and incompetence seen in city departments over the last few years is yet another city department strikes me as unnecessary. We are a small city of only around 85,000 souls. The City of Trenton’s government is not so large that we need another functional department whose stated purpose would be oversight of City programs and to fight abuses in the system.

In a town like ours, we elect a Mayor to ensure Integrity. We elect a Mayor to oversee the city’s departments. We elect a Mayor to fight abuse, supported by a Business Administrator.

The fact that we elected a disaster four years ago does not negate what the office of mayor is for. The fact that we have gone through a series of ineffective and unproductive Business Administrators does not prove we need a brand-new layer of additional overhead.

We don’t need to create new positions; we need to elect and appoint the right people in the first place. If we don’t, a “Director of Integrity and Accountability” won’t make a dime’s worth of difference.

Mr. Perez’s lack of specific references to Trenton’s conditions, and his overly generic platform solutions, such as his earlier expressed proposal to provide high-speed Internet throughout Trenton, bother me.

I’ll move on to Jim Golden and Eric Jackson’s plans tomorrow.