Alexandria City Manager Jim Hartmann offers insights to SPIA students on achieving high performance local government in hard times

Facing budget cuts is never easy but Alexandria City Manager Jim Hartmann is up to the challenge.  The City has 260 fewer positions than last year and 117 of them have been permanently eliminated, according to Hartmann. “When budgets are cut, it creates an opportunity for change,” he told School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) students during a “Conversation on High Performance Local Government in Hard Times.” Adjunct faculty Tom Hickok, who teaches a High Performing Local Governments class, invited Hartmann to Virginia Tech and conducted the recent interview. 

The stage was set for meeting current budget challenges shortly after Hartmann assumed his position with the City of Alexandria four and a half years ago. He created a “managing for results” initiative that took a half million dollar budget that no one could understand and broke it down into funding for specific programs and activities with built in performance measures.

“We took our 156 programs and broke them down even further into 500 activity levels,” Hartmann explained. “Once this was done, there was greater understanding of what we fund, how much things cost, and what each individual program requires as resources.  This gave us tools to work with in situations like the current economic recession because it helps us figure out where our priorities should be and how we can combine services.”

While performance measures are hard to project, he said, his department has worked endless hours on a roadmap for 2009-2011 that will assess, communicate results, define leadership model and competencies, and set expectations for organizational change.

Hartmann said his office has had to make some hard decisions over the past few months. Quite literally, he said, there have been thousands of budget decisions. “We held meetings and sessions with employees. We told them what was coming and how their jobs would be affected.  We told them we would be freezing the payroll,” Hartmann said. “The remarkable thing is that the employees understood. Some even offered other ideas for ways to save money.”

According to Hartmann, the city manager’s office was realigned, with many employees facing great new challenges. People were taken out of their comfort zones but there was good feedback on the change, he said.

From an educational background (Hartmann ran training programs while serving in the Coast Guard and taught at several universities in the United States), he is a strong proponent of continuing education and training. “We want to continually raise the bar but keeping people motivated is difficult.  We need to offer opportunities to help people get ahead.  Part of the new organizational plan is to create a Leadership Institute that will support individual development plans,” said Hartmann.

Involving the public is another component of governing in Alexandria. The vision for the city is a collaborative process involving citizens.  To illustrate, Hartmann pointed to Eco-City Alexandria, a strategic collaborative planning process designed by the City of Alexandria in partnership with Virginia Tech’s Department of Urban Affairs and Planning (UAP) in order to create an Eco-City Charter and Environmental Action Plan that will guide Alexandria toward sustainability.

The public meetings held in relation to Eco-City stimulated new voices in the community, Hartmann said, and has prompted the city to look for other ways to enrich community dialogue.

Alexandria is a very special and very complicated city, Hartmann said.  Encompassing 15 and a half square miles with 140,000 people, some stats put it as the 11th most populated city in the country. “The mix of people is very diverse and we are aware that what we do affects how people live. The City of Alexandria has a formidable task and you don’t do any of this alone. There is no decision that just pops into your head.  Everything requires a lot of calculation and understanding because the consequences of every decision impact the community.”

Hartmann advised SPIA students that to work in public administration requires a passion for service and the willingness to do “some very heavy lifting with a lot of other people to create an environment where people work together.”

A question and answer session followed the interview. Hickok and Anne Khademian, associate chair for  the Virginia Tech Center for Public Administration and Policy (CPAP), presented Hartmann with a plaque to thank him for speaking at Virginia Tech.

Click here to access the complete “Conversation on High Performance Local Government in Hard Times” podcast.

Posted June 18, 2009