Meet Me Downtown

The Tucson City Council is set to adopt a new Downtown Development Management Plan, establishing three teams with interlocking spheres of responsibility:  Planning, to be headed by Downtown Tucson Partnership CEO Glenn Lyons;  Operations, to be headed by the City’s General Services Department Director Ron Lewis;  and Financial, to be headed by the City’s Interim Finance Director Silvia Amparano.

According to a memo from city manager Mike Letcher to the Mayor and Council in advance of Tuesday’s Study Session, the city manager “will continue to manage downtown development”, but as the Mayor and Council “make decisions to proceed with defined projects and processes, the implementation of direction from Mayor and Council will move to a team approach.” 

Each of the three teams will be populated by various City staff from a variety of departments, and two project coordinators—Jesse Sanders and Hector Martinez—“will coordinate communications between team members and will be responsible for publishing activities and reports on a regular basis”. 

The City Council will consider the recommendation at 2:00pm at Tuesday’s Study Session, and based on discussion and feedback, Letcher will return to the Council in August with a proposed contract with the Downtown Tucson Partnership. 

Such reorganizations are cyclical in nature, as the consolidated approach succeeds the decentralized approach and vice versa.  Of course, sometimes consolidation can be disguised as decentralization, but that is a topic for another time. 

Under city manager Luis Gutierrez, it was thought that Rio Nuevo needed to be a separate department of city government, and so the initial Rio Nuevo Director, John Jones and Project Manager John Updike, functioned as an autonomous mini-department of the City.  When city manager Jim Keene appointed Karen Thoreson to be assistant city manager in charge of economic development, the TCC, and Rio Nuevo, the Rio Nuevo office grew in budget and staff, and established its own physical space.  To support the core Rio Nuevo staff, Thoreson put together a larger “team” of City staff from other departments, such as Parks and Recreation, Urban Planning and Design, and Transportation.   As Rio Nuevo’s “roommate” at the time, when I was with the Tucson Downtown Alliance, I attended the Rio Nuevo team meetings, and along with their PR consultant, was the only non-City staffer there.

There seemed to be a buzz of interest inside city government at the time, and an excitement of those from other departments who were invited to be part of this ambitious effort. 

The team approach was not what undermined the effort, but some very poor decisions of a strategic nature at the top.  This was the era of the $100 million UA Science Center that morphed into the $350 million Rainbow Bridge.

Mike Hein succeeded Jim Keene, and Hein saw the Rio Nuevo office, with its comfortable green digs above Enoteca Pizzeria, as a symbol of an effort that had become as bloated as it was underperforming.  He disbanded the physical office, reduced the expenditure on personnel, and sent Greg Shelko and his two remaining staff to the TCC.  “Rio Nuevo” became “Downtown Development” in an effort to distance it from its already tarnished brand. 

In the process of taking the Rio Nuevo office down a peg or two, the team spirit was broken down, and the effort became paradoxically fragmented at the same time that decision-making was consolidated in the city manager’s office.  In particular, the Dept. of Transportation seemed to be removed from the process, which was awkward and unfortunate, given the many important transportation and infrastructure projects that were planned as foundations for downtown development. 

So now that that era has run its course, we are back to a team approach. 

Decentralization has its advantages, but also some potential pitfalls, as responsibility is diffused. 

Ultimately the power continues to reside with the Mayor and Council and the city manager, and so I hope that those parties do not become complacent by relying too much on their teams.  The Council is still responsible for providing the policy direction for the teams and for maintaining oversight of development progress and financial management. 

The Council discussion can be viewed, as always, live and taped later in the week, on City Channel 12, and on-line, at
http://www.tucson12.tv/programs/MayorandCouncil/index.php.