Chapter 1.19
Home Alone
Richard Carson
Actually, this story does start with me working at home alone. I am sitting in my 3rd floor office with a 315 degree view of the rolling hills of Hockinson, Washington and in the distance Portland, Oregon. My dress today is truly casual. By casual, I mean I am wearing a t-shirt, sweat pants, slippers and my Columbia fleece coat. I sip my coffee as I answer my email, write reports and even wrote the occasional essay. Nice work if you can get it.
I have been a planning director – at the city, county, regional and state level – for some 30 years. But on my 60th birthday (last October), I decided I needed a change of scenery. My last job was as the director of Clark County’s Community Development Department. After nine years, I was the longest serving director they ever had. The job was demanding because I was managing a staff of 160, had an annual budget of about $15 million and we reviewed about $600 million a year in new construction. According to the 2000 Census, Clark County was the fastest growing county in the state of Washington and in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area.
But after 30 years, I wasn’t happy. Dealing with tight budgets, unending personnel problems and elected official constituent issues took its toll. I wouldn’t call it burn out. I would call it enough-is-enough. When the housing industry, and the department’s revenues, tanked in late 2007, the political discussion turned to layoffs. That’s when I decided to quit. I didn’t spend all those years building the finest community development department in the nation, just to start dismantling it.
Now that may sound a bit hasty to you. I mean retirement usually isn’t until you are at least 65 years old. But I am not a retirement kind of guy. I technically retired out of the Oregon PERS system a few years ago, but I kept working for Clark County. Truth was my wife took an early retirement from Kaiser Permanente and she collects my retirement check. She obviously is the smart one in the family. We have 21 acres, three horses, three dogs and five chickens, so she keeps busy. As a master gardener, she has a lot of land to work with. We also have two adopted Chinese daughters, ages 8 and 12, who need our attention.
My quitting was not a rash act. Back in the year 2000, the county hired a consulting firm called Citygate Associates to do a best management practices review of my department. Actually, doing the review was one of my better ideas. Better that I asked for it early in my tenure and got the credit, than having one forced on me later to my discredit. Now a review may sound pretty scary. But in reality it means that an objective third party comes in and reviews your organization, processes and procedures against tried and true best management practices.
My experience with Citygate Associates was so positive that over the years I kept talking to them about working with them. And last year I made the leap of faith. It has been an amazing and rewarding experience. As a planning director, the world of best management practices ends at your in-box. In other words, you don’t have time to talk to other directors about what they are doing. The best you can hope for is reading about what others experience in publications like Planning, Public Management or Governance magazines.
In my new job, I travel around the country talking to planning practitioners and learning from them. For example, our current clients include San Diego, Sacramento and Solano Counties in California, and Salt Lake City, Utah. What occurs is a two-way dialogue where I learn a lot about what they have tried, and what they thinks works or doesn’t, and why. It is one of the most amazing and rewarding educational experiences I have ever had.
Now to be fair, I don’t spend all my days in my home office. I spend about a third of my time on-site with my clients doing interviews, surveys and focus groups. You have to understand the place you are working for through the eyes of both their internal and external customers. Every job is different because every city or county is different. But they all have one thing in common. They all want to be the best they can be. And that is a virtue I can really agree with.
Richard Carson is a Senior Associate for Citygate Associates and General Manager of their Pacific Northwest office. Rich is also a doctorate candidate at Washington State University. He can be reached at his 3rd floor office at richcarson@Q.com or at www.CitygateAssociates.com.
