Minutes 01-29-2016 - Laserfiche WebLink

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2 Manager's Office. Board members were asked to arrive at the retreat with any questions, insights, concerns, or other thoughts regarding these results. Commissioner Burroughs asked if the community colleges played a role in the administration's strategic priorities for employment. Travis Myren said a Durham Tech representative participated in the Human Services and Education team. The team talked through some of the challenges that exist to accessing Durham Tech, especially with regard to transportation (which is a huge barrier), and potential job readiness work with which Durham Tech could help the County. Durham Teach already operates classes on site with the County, and staff is hoping there will be more of that shortly. The team also discussed a community college tuition scholarship program provided by Durham County. Commissioner Burroughs said that she was glad to hear that the community college is being kept clearly in the administration's mind. Commissioner Dorosin said that he appreciated the list of internal priorities in the Manager's report. While the Commissioners are aware of internal issues, such as wage compression and technology, the Board tends to focus its attention on external matters. He said he is interested in thinking more about how internal priorities affect the external ones. He said he is also interested in hearing how adequate, clear, and helpful the direction from the Board is to the staff from the staff's perspective. He said he was pleased to see that quality of work life was rated highly in the administration's priorities, and he is excited to see the creation of cross-department teams. He said he is curious about where the Social Justice goals fit in. Bonnie Hammersley said that it is new and important for the County to address internal priorities in this strategic, cross-departmental manner, and that over time as the internal priorities are addressed they will become more routine and stronger foundations for the external priorities. She said she does quarterly information sessions with all employees. She said she is seeing that the internal issues —the morale and compression issues —are strong. These are the issues the Board has hired her to address. She said her goal for the organization is that over time the employees will be even more focused externally; we are public servants and we should be serving the public. Bonnie Hammersley said in her last position in Michigan they had been implementing across the board cuts since 2008, but when you do that over and over again you wind up hurting the essential services of government. She said she used this strategic priority setting process there to engage the department heads in the decision making process. She said as she went through that for five years, she realized that this was a sustainable model that also could be used in jurisdictions where cuts were not happening, because there never are enough resources to do all the things you want to do. Commissioner Dorosin said he hoped that in the same way the administration is asking the staff to cross-silos in setting priorities that the internal and external silos will get crossed. Bonnie Hammersley said that the model she is using is conducive to that. She Hammersley added that the Board's social justice goals apply to the work of all of the functional leadership teams. Travis Myren said that Goal 4 could be thought of as a broad category into which many of the internal concerns of the County government might be placed. Commissioner Jacobs said that there are County priorities that are assumed, for example, making government more accessible to the public, and raising and maintaining an environmental awareness—which might be better served if made explicit. He said staff's work has given us the integuments of what it is that we are, he said, and it is up to us now to flesh that out. Commissioner Pelissier asked if the department heads felt that the Board's current goals are not clear.