Town Council Work Session
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What does the government efficiency study presented by Mr. Jinks cover?
I already said that.
Good evening, Mayor, Council. Tonight is a follow-up agenda item from a November meeting where there was a request to have some information on a government efficiency study. I'm gonna introduce Mr. Mark Jinks here. He's gonna present some information. Mr. Jinks has been in local government a few years, most recently as deputy city manager and city manager of Alexandria, and he's helped the town through the annexation process with some review of the information as part of that process. So I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Jinks and let him present to you. Thank you. Hello. It's a pleasure to be here and to come from the other end of the DMV, the southern end to the northern end probably from one of the most historic places to the other most historic place in the region.
So it feels like home a little bit. Now let's talk about the study that was done as part of the annexation process. It's a study that was acquired by the Virginia Commission and local government. It's standard for any annexation process they have. They want to make sure in having a uh independent review that the jurisdiction is getting the land is is competent and capable and is reasonably efficient uh the methodology um
i'll skip that and mayor uh just we don't have this up on our screens here
You can continue while
we're... Okay, good. This was a review of the town as a whole. It was not a review of individual departments or individual programs, although there are a few references here and there, like police response times, but it was really looking at the town as a whole, somewhat similar to the way the bond rating agencies would conduct a review. And the conclusion was that, as you well know, you have strategies, systems, and structures in place, key policies. You think long term. The report looked at how fiscally you measured against other towns in Virginia. The Auditor of Public Accounts gathers that information. and reports it annually, and as indicated in the report, Leesburg fares very well in that measure, particularly against as far as cost per capita compared to your other three major Northern Virginia towns.
The methodology also includes my interviews at length with the senior departmental leadership and other staff within the The city government and you have attached to the Knights agenda the report. The one of the. issues the commission local government wants to make sure that the government is stable that it responds to issue consistently that whatever land that's coming into the jurisdiction can trust that they kind of know where things have been going and and how well things are run clearly you've had a town uh form of government for a very long period of time and professionally managed. You've got a long range of plans that council has reviewed and adopted. And looking at financial management practices, they are consistent with best practices in local government.
and also yours have compared, I think, compared to a lot of local governments in this region, whether large or small, you have more stable leadership in a sense of long-term tenured employees. And when you see a lot of turnover in an organization, you go, like, something's going on there. And in this case, you have department heads with very, very, very long tenure. Your budget processes are Um, basically set in place. You recently expanded your time schedule and you're doing additional work in the earlier, kind of earlier than typically your budget process in the past. And that is a good thing. One of the things that's clear in this government is that the town manager has inculcated in the people a culture of continuous improvement.
And you can say, well, this report was done three years ago, and so it's a bit dated in some ways and some of the story in it. However, checking back within the last month or two with various people within city government, it's largely what has been stated before is still valid. performance measures are put in place the employee evaluations are a good accountability tool and the so in regards to kind of a dozen good structures and systems don't ensure you have good outcomes but without them it's almost as sure you don't have good outcomes so it is good to see those in place and probably more discipline in the structure and connection from the employee evaluation
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Agenda
2 itemsSpeakers
6 identified
Kelly Burk 19 min
Zach Cummings 9 min
Nicholas Krukowski 9 min
Neil Steinberg 6 min
Todd Cimino-Johnson 3 min
Kari Nacy 2 min
Officials recognised by voice; public commenters shown as “Speaker N” unless they state their name.