By Bart Benjamin
Comments shared at November 14th‘s council meeting.
A few months back I had the need to dispose of some old landscape timbers, which were very heavy for my wife and I to remove from the curb. I called my good friend Michael DeBrouse and asked him, if when he is in the neighbor if he could pick them up in the truck and I would help him load them? He immediately said he could not use a city truck, but would figure something out. At the end of the day, Michael DeBrouse had spoken to our cities Service Director Mr. John Hnottavange and he said, “You can use my personal truck during your lunch time if you want to. Michael ask Tim Hlad and Nick Favazzo to help him and they gave up their lunchtime to pick up the timbers. This shows once again, how helpful the people in our service department are. They really do care about taking care of all of us and the needs of our city. I want to thank you Michael DeBrouse for doing this for me.
Moving on, I would like to thank our Fire Department under Chief Brian Ripley’s tutelage for once again providing another great pancake breakfast last Sunday. My family looks forward every year and certainly enjoyed this year’s breakfast.
I would also like to mention our fantastic Police Department who protects and helps us 24 / 7. We are so lucky to have a full time police force performing outstandingly under Chief Jon Golden’s watch. They put their lives on the line every day when leaving for work. They put their own issues in the background and put your needs up front and to this I say from all of us, we thank you.
Allow me to mention some important issue we are facing. I have over 40 years’ experience, managing groups of people. These groups ran anywhere from 15 employees to 300 employees.
I started out managing small groups and doing everything myself, which included planning new projects, establishing the daily and weekly workloads, which included developing man-power and machine workloads, all production requirements, even recommending purchasing requirements and sometimes placing raw material orders. I always tried to be highly productive and efficient by holding myself accountable at all levels. To do this, meant I needed to keep a watchful eye on the pulse of what was going on everywhere.
As the requirements grew, I rather quickly learn – I could not do it all. I was doing exactly what John Hnottavange has been doing for the last 3 years since he became Service Director. You do not know it, but John really has no family life to speak of; he has been working a minimum of 15 hours a day even on weekends and during his vacation – John is always on call.
I was slowly burning myself out just like John has been and is doing now. The difference between John and I, is I realized there was a problem and did something about it.
On the other hand, John has not yet realized there’s a monitoring and execution issue in his department that needs to be corrected. John is not keeping up with the workload and the way Macedonia is growing he will never catch up – without our help. John cannot be efficient when he’s out of the office driving around doing his best to motivate, lead, and monitor 5 different groups of workers working out of 5 different locations.
He continues to try so hard to monitor his workers and what they are doing and if they following what he had directed them to do. Where the issue starts, is when he’s running around in his truck – his office work is not getting done – we have all heard before, no one can be in two places at once.
This is one of the reason why it takes entirely too long to get projects started and completed professionally in the planned time frame. It is not efficient to run projects when there is a lack of direct and daily direction, thus reducing service department efficiency which is seriously lacking today.
After John’s busy day in the field, he gets to come back to his office, do paperwork and develops tomorrows working plan. When does this man come up for air? Our council members need to stand up now and make this problem go away. We must support John so we can have an efficient running Service Department that keeps up with Macedonia’s needs as we grow.
You might ask how do we fix this? The answer is, like cities around us have done, we develop a management service department buffer position. Who’s first priority is to maintain control of what needs to be completed for the day and help the staff where he can. We should have created this buffer position for John and his service department staff at lease 2 ½ years ago.
I am not saying the current Service Department staff, all 16 of them, does not – nor cannot do the job, they have certainly proven they can. Lately they have been working and trying to pull the load without John being directly onsite, but you cannot run the city services requirements from a phone at home in pain or driving around in a truck. It just will not work.
When John is better by the end of the year, he needs to stay in his office – not in a truck . The only communications John should have doing working hours with his Service Department staff is through this newly created buffer position.
If I may suggest, counsel should strongly consider approving to hire a non-union person as a Service Department buffer, who has the current experience working with cities in regards to all services a Service Department needs to provide. This person must have excellent recommendations noting their work history in the field management area. i.e. The new person will NOT be sitting behind a desk, he will be in the field monitoring job performance compared to directions for the day. This person must be personable, strong in management techniques, think outside the box, not easily swayed, and willing to hold staff employees and himself accountable, which currently, it is not being done. This new person needs to start working nights since there currently no supervision. This effort will quickly STOP time from being wasted.
The last thing I want to mention is our city council has finally approved a salary increase for our Mayor after 19 years. This is utterly ridiculous for this city to let this position to be under paid, for so long. We the people just voted and put our mayor in place for the next 4 years to run our city. That means the Mayor is responsible for everything that happens in every department every day and must monitor their performance. He cares about all employees, including their efficiency and accuracy in all aspects of how they are performing their duties. He is not a micro manager and that is important to mention – he allows department heads to manage and make the decisions to run their department correctly.
In this year, the mayor has met with all department managers; he has updated incorrect procedures that were running awry i.e. giving us false hopes for our cities money and our projected growth. Our Mayor holds himself personally accountable and we, Macedonia citizens hold him accountable. All department heads have agreed to be accountable, for their department actions, which will improve overall department efficiency from the head person to the last person hired.
Macedonia has and will continue to grow, we cannot STOP it and we need to keep our mayor at the helm, who continually gives 100% effort in all areas of this city 365 days a year. It is not an 8 to 5 job. That is exactly what we have at the TOP right now with our Mayor Nick Molnar.
Folks who are not aware of the approved salary increase I share this. When you considered cities around us and what their mayor is being paid and the fact that our mayor’s salary was considerably less than any other city department heads he is responsible for and put our cities needs a head of your personal feelings then I would hope you’ll understand why the salary increase was the right decision to be approve.
My thanks goes out to those council members who stood up and did the right thing to approve the Mayor’s Salary increase.
