OPEN HOUSE SHOWCASES PROPOSED CHARTER
Former Spa City mayors, Watertown city manager address public
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y.>> Sharon Addison, city manager of Watertown in Jefferson County N.Y., spoke to interested residents about her duties as city manager of an approximately 27,000 populated city during the Charter Review Commission’s open house Tuesday afternoon.
Addison agreed with William McTygue when he called the city manager position an operations manager.
“The city manager is the chief executive officer of the city,” said Addison. “I’m responsible for the day-to-day operations.”
Addison has served as Watertown city manager for five years now. She spent 27 years working for the federal government with 18 of those years in a management role.
Watertown has five-members, including a mayor, responsible for legislative actions. It’s an at-large election, so the council members do bring their own priorities from their constituents.
In January 2017 Water-
town will require all landlords to register their properties. Initially a council member mentioned that idea to Addison. Addison requires the council members to pass a resolution first before creating a program like rental registration.
Addison makes sure the departments that would be impacted by a change do the proper research. Addison also has to incorporate costs of the project. For the rental registration, Watertown had to hire an additional person, purchase proper code enforcement software and additional hardware tables to bring on site.
“Knowing all that, we didn’t have those startup costs in [the previous] year’s budget so I worked with the council member and said ‘hey, ideally this is when we want to start it--give me six months after we approve the budget so that we have time to go out and procure the software,’” said Addison.
Meanwhile, a grant the city applied for arrived that helped with the funding for the project.
It was Addison who noticed the need for a fulltime grant writer that costs the city $60,000 a year.
“What had happen two to three years worth of grant application that weren’t strong enough to net the award, or they were submitted to the wrong agency,” said Addison. “My engineers shouldn’t be writing grants. I want my engineers to be designing roads and bridges.”
Addison said hiring a grant writer was the best thing the city did. The city netted more than $5 million worth of grants in one year.
Addison explained how the city manager’s role is to take the long view.
“Take a more strategic look across the city, across all of the initiatives of all the departments and determine the priorities from everything else that’s going on.
If I need a city engineer to re-focus his team and his design initiatives on another project and put another one on the shelf, I make that determination,” said Addison.
“I made the determination of do we need to change the bus route, and I work obviously with the department head to look we need to expand this bus route. In fact we just did that on Wednesday’s for the farmer’s market.”
Former Saratoga Springs mayors Raymond Watkin and A.C. Reilly spoke at the City Center Tuesday afternoon.
Watkin thinks it’s time for a change.
“I think that form of government we have is strange. Most people know little about it. Most people don’t participate in it,” said Watkin. “It’s important that we let them know that there are changes that would be made would give the city a lot more participation.”
Watkin served as mayor during the nonpartisan election period. The city election became partisan in 1980.
“It changed the character of this city when it became partisan. Completely different,” said Watkin.
“I’m not saying it’s bad to have partisan politics but under the commission form of government, it’s not exactly easy.”
Reilly, believes the commission form of government, which was created in the 20th century, is outdated.
“I think in that time when things were simpler it did work.
Any form of government I’m absolutely convinced can work if the people are committed to what’s best for the entire city and if they are absolutely committed to working together collaborating, however, sometimes you get into situations where there are efforts to say no that’s my mine you can’t have it and that sort of thing,” said Reilly. “With centralized management that kind of thing would not occur.”
The proposed charter, which will be voted on November 7, 2017, can be view https://saratogacharter.com/.