After sour City Hall survey, now what? Gig Harbor council mulls next steps

A week after a devastating employee survey shocked City Hall, members of the Gig Harbor City Council are still digesting the results and contemplating how best to respond to the widespread dissatisfaction among city staff.

Proposed solutions range from minor tweaks to a complete change in the city’s type of government. At a study session next week, the council is scheduled to hear from an expert on the council-manager format, in which a professional manager runs day-to-day business.

“The bottom line is that we’ve just seen that we have a really big problem in our city,” said Council Member Tracie Markley during the Dec. 17 study session at which the survey was unveiled. “Rather than point fingers, we need to focus on what our employees are saying and what we need to do to make it right.”

The anonymous survey of 98 city employees portrayed a dysfunctional City Hall, in which the majority of employees distrust and fear Mayor Kit Kuhn and other senior leaders they feel treat them with contempt. The report by the consulting firm InsightLink called the city “a troubled workplace.”

Employees complained of “being spoken to in a rude or unprofessional manner, being talked down to, not having their expertise recognized and being micromanaged,” consultant Marilyn Mitchell told the council.

Among the takeaways: Fully 72 percent of employees said leadership did not treat them with “respect and dignity.” Sixty-eight percent said leadership did not seek out or use their expertise, and 70 percent said leadership did not care what was on their minds. About 32 percent said they expected to leave within two years.

Act quickly, some urge

Council members who spoke with The Gateway over the Christmas holiday — not all could be reached — said the city needs to do something quickly, even if it’s largely symbolic, to persuade employees they’ve been heard.

“Let’s pick some of the low-hanging fruit and start making progress as soon as we can,” said Council Member Le Rodenberg, whose ad hoc committee suggested the survey.

Among the suggestions being floated: Increased training opportunities, more autonomy for department directors, more openness to suggestions by employees, and speeding up hiring to fill open positions.

Rodenberg said he was encouraged by city administrator Bob Larson’s plan to form teams of co-workers, and by the mayor’s statement that he would support an ongoing council oversight committee, as some members have suggested.

Larson told The Gateway in a brief email last week that he has plans to form teams from a cross-section of employees “to work on three to five of the more critical issues.”

“I’m encouraging our employees to participate in making suggestions on what we can do to make improvements and how we can go about doing so,” Larson said.

Sympathy for mayor

Council Member Robyn Denson said she was also encouraged to see the administration taking the initiative, and she hoped Larson would take on a larger role.

“The council did step up, in this case, but the responsibility is with the administration,” she said. “We have a city administrator with 38 years of experience working with mayors. He can set the tone with his day-to-day interactions with employees. To me, how our employees are managed, and how they are addressed, is the number one issue.”

She also expressed some sympathy for Kuhn, who was the target of many employee complaints.

“It’s not an easy job being a mayor,” she said. “And it’s his first foray into elected life. It might be helpful for him to get some outside advice. Maybe it’s a matter of bringing in a professional in this area as a consultant.”

It was the alleged behavior of the mayor that triggered the council’s approval in August of the employee survey. More than 20 employees, including department heads and longtime supervisors, have quit or retired since Kuhn, a former jeweler, became mayor in 2017.

The mayor has maintained that the exodus from City Hall is simply normal attrition. In a statement after the survey became public, he said, “I feel my manner with employees is fair. I listen to them and work with them to solve our tasks at hand.”

It is a difficult problem, council members acknowledge, since under the city’s strong-mayor system, the mayor is accountable only to the voters, and then only every four years.

“He’s an elected official, and he was elected by a wide margin,” Denson noted.

Change in government?

That conundrum has led to interest in the council-manager form of government, in which the mayor plays a largely ceremonial role, while the day-to-day business is conducted by a city manager hired by and reporting to the council.

In a study session on Jan. 7, the council will hear from an expert from the Municipal Research and and Services Center, a nonprofit that advises cities. On Monday, Jan. 11, the council will hear from Michael Wilson, a former Gig Harbor city administrator.

“It’s time we had this conversation,” said Council Member Jeni Woock. “We have a city with a budget of $98 million, and every four years we elect someone without any professional training to run it.”

Rodenberg said he is ready to “listen intently” to discussions about changing the form of government.

“On the face, it makes sense to me, and not just with this particularly mayor.” he said. “Over the years, we’ve elected some real nice men and women as mayor, but none of them was really trained in administration. If we had a professional city manager, he or she could concentrate on administration, and the ribbon-cutting and the baby-kissing could be done by the mayor.”

Changing the form of government would require a vote of the public, but “there’s a lot of talk within the town by prominent people who think it’s a good idea,” Rodenberg said.

Low-hanging fruit

As for those low-hanging fruit, Rodenberg said a good first step would be identifying training opportunities for employees who want to learn more about their jobs, since that was a major complaint in the survey.

“In a city of only 110 employees, there’s not a whole lot of room to move up, but one of the things the survey told us is that many employees are interested in learning just for the sake of doing their jobs better,” he said. “And it doesn’t have to be expensive. There are trade organizations that offer classes and certifications at reasonable cost.”

Skimping on training is “false economy,” Rodenberg said. “These things pay for themselves. You get a more efficient work force because people really know their jobs.”

The larger task, he said, will be changing the culture of the workplace.

“We can do some things with policy and procedure, but you can’t instill trust and respect by policy,” Rodenberg said. “You can’t legislate that stuff. Those things need to be earned.”

This story was originally published December 30, 2020 at 5:00 AM.