Mill Creek and the private-sector look

I’m a fan of Ray Novotny and his vast Mill Creek MetroParks knowledge.

I like Mill Creek Executive Director Aaron Young and his desire to create a more efficient operation.

Thus, Friday’s swift and stunning elimination of several veteran park staffers, including Novotny, generated plenty of conflicting feelings. For me, at least.

Feelings from others were less conflicted on social media. There, the public mood was expectedly nasty – early, prolific and often.

Young’s move slices right through the dichotomy that is the Mahoning Valley.

“We are a fierce and loyal lot” is a line I’ve used before about this area – raised for generations on bloody diets of football and boxing; souls who survived when Big Steel tossed workers out on the street.

That’s a Valley script presented different ways depending on which tavern you are at, or which church dinner you attend, or which football stands you are sitting in. Many, many versions; same core message: “If anyone’s to speak bad of us, it will be us and only us.”

But ...

Just as much as we espouse this, we are just as sporting about kicking our government operations and spending. The Vindicator spends a lot of ink on such matters. Our critics like to say it is “just The Vindicator.” But if those critics audited our phones and emails, they’d learn quickly that our actions are the result of public outcry.

This past November, most new tax requests went down to voter defeat. One exception, oddly, was the Mill Creek levy.

People demand more accountability, more efficiency and more honesty with their tax dollars. The cliche cry is, “If only government acted more like the private sector.”

Well, ask for it, and Friday is what “act more like the private sector” can look like.

What will be bantered for a while is what is already out in social media. Most of the comments look like this:

“The manner in which they were let go is inexcusable. As a member of the community that loves and supports this park, I am saddened by these shameful actions.”

“The treatment these folks received is shameful.”

“What the heck is going on??? Police escorts. Employees with 27+ years being let go!!! Levy passed!! Something doesn’t seem right with this. Explain.”

Of the senior staffers let go Friday, Novotny is whom I’ve met the most. Sunday walking tours with him are a great experience, and I will miss them.

In eight years here, I’ve also known a variety of park upper management, including its past three directors. Each had comments, criticisms and frustrations with park staff entrenchment. Each had varied tales of park challenges. But each came to a consistent core theme of operations challenges.

And now it’s Young’s problem to figure out.

The timing of all this is interesting.

Just completing one year on the job, Young was confronted with the first lakes closure in history. Such an event will tell you a lot about your staff. The problem was, in part, a long-standing city sewer issue kicked from one mayor to the next and from one park director to the next.

Unique in Young’s handling was that, as the community started to look at Mill Creek as the problem, he quickly defended the park and called out that “no, this is also a city problem and a regional watershed problem.” For a first-year, outsider government boss to publicly point to another is not how local government usually works.

Another unique story line from Young’s first year and new demands is that the golf operations essentially paid for themselves last summer. For decades, that has been a near- impossible feat. General taxes too often subsidized operations by as much as $300,000 a year.

Critics of the Friday terminations who are taking to social media are viewing the recent tax-levy story lines as a ruse. I think instead, the levy success fueled Friday’s actions, as did Young’s completing one year. His fall levy campaign line over and over was to the effect of “the taxpayers expect us to spend their dollars in the best way possible, and I will.”

One onlooker told me Friday that another consistent 2015 theme heard from Young was his struggles at getting some veteran staffers to operate differently. Position that information with a comment from a dismissed staffer who said Friday that the park is already short-staffed, and this will make it worse.

From those two points, and considering the golf example, it is easy to ask this:

Is there truly not enough staffing? Or is there enough manpower if folks would define and assert themselves differently as the new boss asks?

I know Young enough to like him and not walk away from a chat scratching my head at some things that he says. There is not a lot of boast in his talk. Just cold facts and hot beliefs. He is steely-eyed and determined.

Standing on the outside looking in, staff efficiency will be impossible to accurately measure. It’s a matter of perspective and whom you want to hear.

And that’s where all this gets back to the cliche cry of “run government more like private sector.”

This is what private sector can be like.

What could certainly have been different, and what likely will linger longest for Young and the board, is the cold, brutal manner in which “better government” was handed out Friday. Calling it “firings” was inaccurate, Young said. But at the coffee counters and bar stools, it’s firings.

Private sector also deals with entrenchment. And sure, there are such immediate dismissals.

But there also are forced retirements, announced future eliminations, closed-room deals and other maneuvers that allow for a less-caustic scene than turning Mill Creek into Enron, Tyco or a 1920s steel strike with Pinkerton’s boys. It’s clear that’s not a path Young and the board chose, and they will wish they did years down the road.

To his fans, Novotny is Volney Rogers and Fred Rogers. Keith Kaiser is a 27-year staffer and boss of beloved Fellows Riverside Gardens. You know – the roses, the tulips and the butterflies.

If the veteran staffers are guilty of entrenchment, not becoming more efficient and not adjusting to new management, that certainly is not as guilty as the Valley’s more sordid government events.

Time will tell if this makes for better park operations in the challenges behind the scenes that taxpayers and voters don’t get to see.

But the time immediately in front of us will be pretty bruising for all involved, whether you are still employed or are not.

Todd Franko is editor of The Vindicator. He likes emails about stories and our newspaper. Email him at tfranko@vindy.com. He blogs, too, on Vindy.com. Tweet him, too, at @tfranko.