Coping with
Political
Pressure

As a middle-level manager in Zenith City's bureaucracy, you never get phone calls from a member of the city council. So when your colleagues told you that Donna Sadler was on the phone, you dismissed it as an office prank: “She’d never call me.”

But they insisted that this was for real. And so, apprehensively, you picked up the phone. Your apprehension was warranted.

Sadler represents the blue-collar West End community. Indeed, she has a well-established—and well-deserved—reputation for representing her constituents aggressively. So your phone conversation began with few of the customary pleasantries.

Sadler was calling about the new West End Community Park. Actually, the park doesn’t exist—yet. Your responsibility, as the contracting officer, is to make it happen.

The park has been a dream in the West End. Community leaders have long complained—and are still complaining—that city hall neglects them. It isn’t just that this dense city ward has relatively few parks or other recreational facilities. Activists have argued that the mayor, the council and the bureaucracy have ignored all sorts of community needs.

Trash collection was substandard. The police seemed indifferent to community needs. Violent crime was down, but the same wasn’t true for those smaller forms of public disorder that make a neighborhood seem unsafe: loitering, aggressive panhandling, teenage street-corner drinking. Even the quality and quantity of fire-fighting equipment, the activists complained, were not up to the standards available in the rest of the city.

So when Donna Sadler ran for the council a few years back, she promised to make city hall pay attention to the West End. Sadler has lived up to her word. She pushed the fire department to update its stations and to add the latest equipment for emergency medical services. She pestered the commander of the West End police precinct to disrupt the patterns of panhandling and public drinking. And, amazingly, she even managed to persuade the sanitation department to, somehow, get its frontline workers to do a better job of collecting trash from neighborhoods in her district.

In just a few years, Sadler established a reputation of producing for her constituents. Further, she established a reputation as being one of the most aggressive members of the council. Now she is on your case—or, officially, at least, on the case of the West End Community Park.

Although long a dream of everyone in the West End, the park never seemed to happen. The city couldn’t find the land. It couldn’t find the money. It couldn’t find a qualified contractor. Or it found too many contractors, but people in Parks and Recreation disagreed with community representatives about who should get the job. New barriers kept cropping up. Sometimes they were big. Sometimes they were small. But such barriers always existed.

Sadler had fixed all that. She had knocked heads at city hall. And although she had not knocked the heads of community activists, she had persuaded them that if they really wanted the park, they would have to compromise with many of government’s rules.

As a result, the city had contracted with Daubach Community Developers to build the park. The city had acquired the land, appropriated the funds and negotiated the construction contract. Then, the responsibility for administering the contract was turned over to you.

Unfortunately, DCD had done nothing. DCD wasn’t just a community association with lots of enthusiasm and no technical ability. In the past, with similar contracts, it had demonstrated that it had the capacity to build community centers, skating rinks, swimming pools, parks. It was an established organization, with no hint of financial trouble or internal turmoil. Still, nothing had happened.

As the contract stipulated, the city had made an initial payment to Daubach. But even though DCD had not qualified for the second payment, it had asked you—indeed, pressed you—to approve one. You, however, had simply said no. Until DCD completed the milestones required by the first stage of the contract, you could not authorize a second payment.

So you guessed why Sadler was calling. And you guessed right. Sadler was calling to request that you approve a second payment. And request she did. She was polite but forceful. She asked if there wasn’t some way that you could justify a second payment.

You explained that there wasn’t. DCD had not done what the first payment required. So you carefully (but not condescendingly) described the city’s contracting rules.

As the phone conversation ended, Sadler made it very clear that she was not satisfied with your answer and that she was not dropping the issue.

As you hang up the phone, you know that you have done the correct thing. But you aren’t sure that you have done the smart thing.

For Bob Behn's approach to this month's public management dilemma — or to post your own ideas — click here.

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