08-30-16 Personnel and Finance - Laserfiche WebLink

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give them a home to interface with us more. In addition, we think the Century Center, the Morris, the Palais, the parking garages, Parks and Recreation, the Print Shop, the streetscaping that had to do with DTSB and Westside main streets. These are all groups that have historically not been accountable to one another. Collectively they have been impacting the City, but what can be a more cohesive impact, where we can collaborate more closely and actually more formally integrate our organizations into one another. That is the goal of the emerging Department of Venues, Parks and Arts. All of these organizations have evolved through the years, but we've never really had a chance, we've been so busy working in the business that we forget to work on the business. Some of the themes you have been hearing are that financial resources are strained and at risk and we have aging infrastructure, so that means we need to be smarter about how we do things. Then there is this idea that there is a heightened evolving set of expectations from the community, especially when it comes to quality of life. A park used to be some open space, relatively well- maintained, a merry -go- round, and a metal slide. Nowadays we have skate parks and splash pads, pavilions, and various amenities, dog parks, the streets, it used to be enough to be safe, well -lit, and generally have no potholes, and now we are talking about flags and public art in the roundabouts and how we take care of those things. The expectations and responsibilities are continuing to evolve. The structure we have had is a little redundant and inefficient. Different departments have people taking care of buildings, grounds, marketing, sales, fundraising, it seemed to make sense if they're all entities owned and funded by the City, that we would have them working pretty closely together. Sometimes the big picture no brainers are sacrificed at the expense of the individual unit goals. Mr. Perri stated he was talking this morning with the Palais group, and an example that came to mind was when a bride books a wedding at the Palais. They spend a lot of money and they say hey, there is that parking garage across the street that costs $5, can we get that free for our guests. Then the Palais would say no, even though it is owned by the City, it is a different department. Well, we spent a lot of money over there at Palais. Big picture is that it would seem to make sense that we would say you're right, you're doing business with the City, let's make this all work together. A lot of these organizations have people that are forced to be jacks of all trades. When you have one marketing person who has to do the graphic design, the web design, the public relations, and deal with all the interviews and sometimes also has to do all of the fundraising and development work, they can't possibly be good at all of those things, and each organization is finding that struggle. The idea is that we use folks more appropriately and allow them to specialize. The underlying point is that each of these organizations will not disappear. Each is its own brand. But each of these things are stronger as a result of them working together. We took a study of where every organization is. This is a good example of two (2) organizations that share a lot of their resources, and they've done it well historically. Mr. Perri showed the work charts of each organization in his presentation which is available in the City Clerk's Office. 12