Church takes on City’s state of mind
By Ali Akhyari
Staff photo: Kathy Church tries to keep the City Council focused on the task of evaluating options for City expansion. However, the hired facilitator found herself getting drawn into the abyssal debate the Council has been circling for months.
As a result of their admitted inability to make any progress on how the City should go about providing more space for its staff and Public Safety Department, the City Council hired a facilitator, Kathy Church, to head their Special Meeting on November 19 which was intended to be an honest discussion on various options the City had at their disposal for expansion.
The Council came up with approximately seven options which included using the original $1.6 million plan, building a separate facility on City owned property, downscaling the original plan, purchasing a nearby private property with structures, using the old Water Plant, renting office space, and redrawing the current plan.
But as the Council examined the various options and developed criteria with which to evaluate them, the face of debate reared its ugly head. Council member Beck later suggested that since the Council members could not even agree on what constituted a reliable source for information, it would be difficult to make progress. However, they agreed to use cost, square footage, City services provided, professional benchmarks/models, and the need for temporary space as criteria to evaluate the various options. The meeting seemed to be flowing well at this point as Church kept them focused. However, when it was suggested that keeping all departments in one building, or Co-location, be used as a criteria, Church decided that the Council needed to agree on this point alone. She also weighed in with her opinion siding with McCarty who said the current trend is to keep all departments in one building. Of course, some Council members did not think co-location should be a deal-breaker when considering the small size of Folly Beach. Church, though, would not let the Council move on without addressing this issue. For reasons unknown, an agreement on how much money to spend, necessary square footage, or any other criteria did not require any consensus while co-location did.
The facilitator finally moved past the issue by excluding it from the list of criteria to be used and a plan was developed that would allow the Council to evaluate the agreed upon options at a future meeting. Every Council member was given an assigned criteria they would use to evaluate every expansion option. They are expected to come together at a future meeting to reveal their data and possibly choose a direction.
Several interesting points and opinions were raised at this meeting as a result of Church’s facilitation. Church began the meeting with a sense of order that inspired hope by giving Council members an opportunity to express any issues that had not been previously expressed in the public forum which resulted in an immediate identification of some problems. One of the main issues for those who opposed the $1.6 million project was that the process skipped what should have been the very first step: consideration of alternatives and a needs assessment process. Dave Stormer pointed out that while at least 11 meetings have occurred where the plan was discussed, the real issue was never actually talked about. There were no standards, he said. The Council never got to consider options prior to Mayor Beckmann presenting a plan.
Discussion quickly shifted to a criticism of the Mayor and foreshadowed the co-location schism that Church identified and put on a pedestal. Eddie Ellis suggested the original process had not been transparent and criticized the Mayor for trivializing their concerns. He also wanted the Council to share in the responsibility of developing a plan with the Mayor, contrary to how the previous plan was developed, so that the “we don’t have to rely on the Mayor for truth”. Scruggs echoed that comment by saying that the strong mayor/weak Council system they are employing is not conducive to teamwork and said Mayor Beckmann basically presented a plan and expected everyone to “fall in line”. Mayor Beckmann, who made his opinion of Council well known at their October meeting was especially quiet and had to be cajoled into speaking by Church. Laura Beck expressed the main counterpoint to Stormer, Ellis and Scruggs saying that the Council had no business “micromanaging” the project and their main responsibility was fiscal. She said that no member of Council is a professional in the field and they should listen to the hired architects in regards to how the City should expand its facilities.
[...] stating it was a waste of taxpayer money to hire a facilitator. Details on that meeting can be read here. College of CARTA Isaiah Nelson, Vice President of the student body at the College of Charleston, [...]