Community Based Government

This blog has had a strong emphasis on financial/labor issues over the past eight months. While the worldwide, national, state and local budget crisis continues unabated, I thought it was time to subtlety shift our focus to how we respond to this crisis.

It is painfully obvious that our community's financial situation is going to continue to deteriorate for some time, and then likely bounce along the bottom for a while. In addition, when the economy eventually improves, it is unlikely to generate property tax and sales tax dollars even close to what we experienced during the 2002-2006 bubble.

Understanding this reality, we in government still have a responsibility to provide excellent service to our community. In order to keep up service levels in an environment of declining resources requires outside the box thinking--and an outside the box resolution. We have to break the model we've been following in local government for 60 years.

The current model of local government is fairly standard from city-to-city, and includes a lot of participation on the part of the bureaucrats and little input from the community. We've been performing the same services for decades, and while we may tweak our delivery method from time to time, there has been no fundamental change in the way we do things.

Here in Manteca, we are about to change the fundamentals--we are going to turn government upside down--literally!

Since we no longer have the funds to do everything, we are going to find our what services are most important to our citizens, what services they'd prefer to do themselves, and what services are a waste of time and money.

I've attached a power point I presented to staff back in September that launched our initiative to convert Manteca to a government that is community based instead of bureaucrat based.

I'll be updating you periodically on what we are doing to shift to this model.

Vision%20Quest.ppt