City Takes Credit and Debit Cards...

For some time we’ve been anxiously awaiting news from the Finance Department that our accounting system will work with credit and debit cards — and that day finally arrived.

The City’s Finance Director sent word around last week that the Finance Department had successfully completed the first step in credit/debit card acceptance for the City of Kent.  Effective  Friday, March 23rd, the Finance Department will accept Visa, MasterCard, and Discover branded credit/debit cards for payment of City Utility Bills.

For right now, as we’re just getting started, customers will need to present their cards in person at the Utility Window of the Finance Department to make their payments.  However, in the not too distant future we anticipate expansion of our acceptance capabilities to include payment of other City bills such as parking fines, refuge bags, etc., in addition to gradual expansion for acceptance by other City departments at other locations, and even on-line.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but with enough persistence and upgrades in technology, you can adapt your system to meet the modern expectation of being able to pay City bills using credit cards.

Credit and debit cards would seem to be a simple module to add to the City’s computer network but I’ve learned to never be deceived into believing anything is simple.  It took a lot of work to get us to this point and I’m grateful for the Finance staff that twisted, bent and tweaked the system to get us this new capability.

Since you never leave home without them, paying your City bills with credit or debit cards should make your life (and ours) much easier.

Kent-Ravenna Rivalry...

The Mayors of Kent and Ravenna have continued their friendly competition for good causes by announcing their plans to beat the other in the collection of donations for local food pantries as part of the Challenge Hunger campaign.

This long-standing city rivalry is always a great motivator for Kent-Ravenna high school sporting events and the Mayors are playing it up to try to inspire donations that will go to families in need in both communites thanks to the great work of the Amelia DiGirolamo Center of Hope in Ravenna and Kent Social Services.

The Challenge Hunger campaign runs from March 1 to March 31 — but the date to remember is March 31st because that’s when both cities will roll out their community collection trucks at the Center of Hope and Kent Social Services.  Residents are encouraged to help fill the truck in their community and win bragging rights for their Mayor.

Strategic Planning and Performing...

With so much going on around the Kent community it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger goals that all this activity is actually building towards.

That was partly why I blogged yesterday about the strategic progress of the City over the last 4-5 years — to help demonstrate the connection between the small successes we’ve achieved on a yearly basis and the City’s long term strategic priorities.

The Kent community is a couple hundred years old, and I’m hoping we’ve got at least another couple hundred more to go, which means we’ve got some time to get this right.  That’s not to say we don’t have a sense of urgency — we do, especially in this current economy — and right now we seem to have a little luck and momentum working in our favor so we’re anxious to take some big strides to get us past the next couple of mile markers on this journey.

A healthy community is a lot like a healthy body.  It takes perseverance and discipline to eat right, exercise and do all the little things that over time add up something significant.   It took a good 10 years to create the overnight success that we’re enjoying in Kent right now, so we’ve got to be planting the seeds now for the next decade’s harvest of great projects for Kent.

I’m a believer in managing your way to success, whether it’s personal fitness or community fitness – especially since the consequences are too important to leave to chance – and that’s where strategic planning comes into play.

Strategic planning isn’t the answer to all our problems but it is a great tool to use to navigate all the twists and turns that stand in the way of prosperity.  By taking the time to know where we want to go before we leave port, our chances for arriving at our destination are a whole lot better than if we just wing it.

There are literally thousands of decisions that we’ll face in trying to move the community forward and those decisions become a lot easier to make correctly when we test them against our strategic priorities.  It’s been my observation in some 25 years of working in local government that most people sincerely want the best for their community but with so many opportunities to pursue, and so many stakeholders to satisfy, they have a hard time focusing their efforts and as a result change is either glacially slow or traumatic, neither of which is particularly good.

Our goal is use strategic planning as a way to be busy with a purpose; to bring focus and keep positive change moving at a steady (aka manageable) pace that keeps the progressives and the conservatives within a mutual comfort range.  Not easy, but I think possible, if we lean heavy on our shared strategic goals as the common denominator and consistently show the connection between what’s going on in the streets and progress towards those goals.

Here’s a couple more strategic tools that we use to keep us firmly rooted while we strive to lift the Kent community even higher towards it’s aspirations.

Click Here to see the activities that occurred in 2011 within each of the strategic categories listed above.

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And lastly, here’s a one page snapshot of our Strategic Priorities and their manageable parts.

Your Council & Staff Work in 2011...

With 2011 still visible in the rear view mirror, I can’t believe we’re already done with the first quarter of 2012.  Time flies.

There are some years that we’re happy to see come to an end but 2011 wasn’t one of those. 2011 is likely to go down as one of those years that people in Kent will be remembering fondly as the year we hit some significant community milestones.

Construction of the new downtown Hotel & Conference Center — CHECK
Construction of the new downtown office and retail Mixed Use Center — CHECK
Completion of Acorn Alley Phase II — CHECK
Beginning a new chapter in the story of the Old Kent Hotel — CHECK
Opening a new manufacturing facility for MAC Trailer and their 200+ jobs — CHECK
Starting the Esplanade Extension — CHECK
Opening the new Fairchild Avenue Bridge — CHECK
New traffic signals on SR59 — CHECK

There’s plenty more where that came from in 2011 and it seems worth taking a few moments to reflect back on how far we’ve come in the last 12 months on our community’s strategic initiatives.

Here’s a few documents that I provide to City Council that does that.

Food Drive...

One of the best parts of living in a college town is being able to see the good things that students do in their adopted community.

The after-hours parties get more headlines but that’s too bad because it only reflects a small portion of the student body and how they spend their time.

As City Manager I have had a chance to meet a lot of student leaders, and the adminstrators at Kent State University, that help channel all that positive student energy into projects throughout the Kent community – and Kent is a better place because of them.

Kent has a lot of great things going on downtown that hold promise for an economic recovery and a brighter future for all of us, but it’s also a place that works hard to open doors to people from all socio-economic levels, making room for low income and distressed families that other communities have squeezed out.

Kent residents are proud of their socially conscious community but let’s be frank, it comes at a price.  Unlike many of our neighborhing cities Kent has children living in poverty, homelessness, and at-risk families who need extra help, and those disenfranchised groups look to their local government to come to their aid and help them lift themselves to a better place in their lives.  That safety net comes at a price.

Kent will not turn its back to those in need, but as City resources suffer the same fate as the economy, the local will remains strong but our pockets are less full than ever before which is why community support networks like Family and Community Services, Coleman Services, Town Hall II and others play such a vital role in our holding our community together.

These organizations are well known in local circles for their services because their impact often depends on the generosity of others, so it pays to make sure people know about the good works that they do.

It turns out that Kent State University is also a significant player in supporting local community services, tapping into student idealism to change the world; it just happens to go about this mission more quietly than the other service providers on-call in Kent.  Literally thousands of hours of volunteer services are provided by Kent State Univeristy students in Kent and Portage County each year, to help reach those with unmet needs.

I’ve seen what hundreds of inspired students are capable of doing when they set their mind to it, which is another reason why I’m so grateful that 100 years ago the founding fathers of Kent State University chose to call Kent their home.

A good example of an upcoming student program is their annual food drive.  If you can support the students, please do, but if not at least know that the students are donating their time and talents to try to make sure that a local family has food to put on their table.

Code Compliance in 2011...

With 2011 in the rear view mirror,  we’ve had a chance to compile statistics on the Code incidents, e.g., trash in yard, illegal signs, unmowed grass, exterior property maintenance, illegal rooming houses, etc.,  for the last year.

Code Compliance is one of those service areas where cities are tasked with trying to legislate a sense of civic duty for property owners or tenants to do all the little things, like keeping yards clean, grass cut and roofs repaired, that over time can mean the difference between a charming neighborhood with rising property values or a blighted block with devalued properties on the decline.

If it wasn’t so important I think most cities would just as soon stay focused on deliverying value-added services, like water, sewer, and street repairs, rather than compelling others to do their part with their personal property — but when you read the City’s list of Strategic Objectives it’s hard not to see the significant impact of property maintenance practices on the achievement of the City’s top priorities.

Code Compliance reads like a who’s who list of the City’s Strategic Objectives:  Strong Neighborhoods, Economic Development, Quality of Life, Environmental Stewardship, and Historical Preservation.  Something this important has to be managed, and part of that management process includes keeping statistics on what’s working, what’s not, and what are the biggest challenges out there.

That’s where we lean on the statistics to inform the discussion, and that’s why we try to look at both 2011 as a 1 year snapshot and as a 5th year to see trends and patterns.

Although the numbers moved around a little over the last 5 years, the recurring trends highlighted in the 20111 Code Compliance report tend to be the same:

For the fourth consecutive year, rental property citations surpassed owner occupied citations for the total number of citations issued – with overgrown vegetation complaints remaining a significant problem for all property owners.  This year rental properties had the most violations for snow removal, whereas commercial had properties the most for the last two years.

Here’s the statistical details for 2011:

Downtown Plan, Parts & Pieces...

With all that is going on in downtown Kent these days, it’s easy to get a little vertigo.

Thankfully we didn’t leave the dock without a plan — or what we call our downtown blueprint — that is our map for navigating the nuances of where we’ve been, where we’re at, and where we’re heading.

Like any good architect we never leave home without it and when things start sliding sideways unexpectedly, and get a littly hairy, we’re quick to pull it out to re-calibrate, settle down, and forge ahead with confidence.

Perspective is key when you’re involved in a project of the magnitude of revitalizing a downtown — and that perspective has many levels, from the proverbial big picture to the nano-details that typically the engineers deal with but occassionally bubble up to my desk in response to some last minute detour.

Everyone has their own preferred style of managing multi-tasking, and where our City Engineer has project spreadsheets one-quarter mile wide by a half-mile long, I happen to be more visually inclined, which means I keep lots of pictures around to keep me on track.

To that end, I decided it was time to update the big picture blueprint for downtown that we’ve been using in order to keep up with all the changes that are going on.

As you’d expect from a blueprint with such an audacious ambition as transforming a downtown, it’s big, but if you click on the image below it will up load in full for better viewing.

It’s been my experience that the best opportunities are found in the space between the many project elements and if I can’t see how all the parts and pieces fit together, I’ll miss those hidden jems that separate the best projects from the merely good.

We’re aiming high for downtown Kent so I spend a lot of time looking, talking, thinking, strategizing, and agonizing over what we might be missing or what combination we overlooked that would yield an even better result than what we’ve already got started.

Projects like this are a once in a lifetime moment, so we want to make sure we get everything we can out of it while it’s here.  The downtown projects were never meant to be an end point — on the contrary, we always planned on them being the starting points for the many things that the Kent community aspires for.

I’m thrilled that the downtown project will bring some 400 new jobs in downtown Kent but I’m already looking out further along the horizon to see what new jobs would be created by having all those new jobs in the downtown.  What businesses would benefit from being in close proximity to a vibrant downtown?  Do we have places to put those new businesses?  Is the infrastructure ready to handle the second wave of jobs that eminates out from the new downtown?

Hard questions, hence my vertigo.

In order to build something new sometimes you have to take things apart to see them from a different perspective.  When you look at the downtown blueprint, there’s so much going on that it’s easy to lose sight of the forest through the trees, so I’ve at least tried to break down the categories so folks like me can see that there actually is a method to the apparent madness.

We have strategic themes that run through the plan elements that bind them together in a way that we think makes the downtown project special because of the way its pieces uphold the many different values that the residents of the Kent community say are important to them — rather than sacrificing one for the other.

Achieving that is really hard (which is why so few communities are able to pull it off) but when we started down this path we were very careful to say that our goal is to not air-lift in and plop a bunch of new buildings next to our downtown and call our job complete.

Our prime directive was to re-energize, revitalize and integrate old, new and everything in between, in order to make sure that downtown Kent was a place that reflected the best of the unique Kent community and it’s cast of characters for decades to come.

We knew that its a fine line to walk between promoting progress and honoring heritage but we were crazy enough to try because we felt that the future of the community was at stake.  We may make some mis-steps along the way but it won’t be for lack of effort at getting this balance right.  We work on it and wrestle with it every day.

Here’s my short list of the values and their respective elements that we believe are key to the downtown’s success and are evident in what’s going on in downtown Kent right now.

We’ll see if we can get all these done this afternoon and start something new in the morning.  LOL  (must be the vertigo hitting me again.