Posted: 11:00 a.m. Sunday, June 7, 2015

City manager: 5-year plan for Middletown on track

By Ed Richter

Staff Writer

MIDDLETOWN — 

There something to be said about making a plan, working the plan and staying on the plan.

Last year, when Doug Adkins was in the running to become Middletown’s next city manager, he presented a five-year, 120-page conceptual plan to City Council with the goal of bringing the city back to prosperity in a sustainable fashion.

As Adkins nears the end of his first year, he said the job has pretty much been as he expected it would be, and that he hasn’t deviated very much from his plan to reach that goal.

“I knew we were coming off of the recession, and I got the benefit of an improving economy. But I also told council where I intended to go and what I intended to do,” Adkins said. “When I brought things to council that were consistent with the plan, they gave me the cooperation they told me they would give me.”

A former Vandalia city councilman, Adkins, 52, understands the needs of council members from their perspective. He said council has been kept in the loop, adding they are getting continuous information to make decisions starting the next day after a council meeting.

In addition, his knowledge of the city from the past 11 years as a city prosecutor and the community revitalization director has made him aware of the many issues facing Middletown and helped to focus in on a number of different initiatives such as working with the city’s landlords organization to collaborate in developing a chronic nuisance ordinance.

So far, he said there have not been any surprises, and the focus of his first year was gathering information and putting the pieces back together.

“That’s been the pleasant part of the job,” he said. “You have a plan, and it’s doing what you thought it would. You don’t want any surprises.”

While he hasn’t had any surprises, Adkins said there have been several challenges in implementing some culture and organizational changes.

“It’s not been a cake walk,” he said. “It’s a lot of hard work. The biggest challenge has been pushing the organization and pushing the city forward at a pace that everyone can stay on board with. You have people who want to fix Middletown on Thursday, and you can’t fix Middletown on Thursday.’

Adkins said there were a number of things that need to be worked on ranging from deferred maintenance projects to working to raise property values.

“It’s going to take big, big swings of the pendulum that need to happen, and you can’t fix those on the fly,” Adkins said.

He said inside city hall, employees have gone several years without a pay raise and have endured budget and personnel cuts, and there is a frustration in the community and in the organization that everyone wants to get things better, quicker than is realistically possible.

While culture change is difficult and needs to be done incrementally, Adkins has also faced the challenges of mistrust in government at all levels. He said the key to changing the culture both inside and outside of the City Building is to be consistent in what is said, what is done and doing what you say you’re going to do.

That was one reason Adkins created “The Middletown Way,” an internal program that teaches city employees how they should treat the public, why it’s important and why the employees should take pride in what they do.

In addition, Adkins has been working to make city government more transparent by making city finances available to view online, posting the progress of city departments in reaching their goals, and working to ensure city government is more accessible and as inclusive as possible.

Adkins said he has been available to organizations throughout the community and city departments are also reaching out into the community to interact with residents and providing the opportunity to get updates or more information on issues. Some of those efforts include meetings on race relations in the community as well as the heroin summits that have been held several times in recent months.

Breaking down some barriers when things did not go right, such as last summer’s incident with the Unity Picnic with the fireworks in the South End when the city did not have a good line of communication open.

“We had a crisis there and to open that up, look at it, admit our mistakes which is something we’re often not inclined to do as a government and continue the dialogue beyond the incident past the incident,” Adkins said. “It’s one thing to say we dealt with this and turn your back and move back to what you were doing. We’ve talked to Pernell Huff and the organizers of the Unity gathering four or five times over the last year. We’re probably going to partner with them in some way with this year’s event and have a police presence and a fire presence there. Hopefully, it will be in a more positive manner than we had last year.”

Huff, founder of the Unity Gathering, told the Journal-News that Adkins has been doing a good job and called him “a stand-up guy.”

“That (last year’s Unity event) didn’t pan out that well then,” Huff said. “But I think he’s done a lot of things to improve (relationships). I’ve seen him at various community events, and he said he’s going to be there this year.”

Some of those changes Adkins has implemented include a restructuring of the city administration that included the public safety department as well as the leadership changes in the police and fire divisions; adding another assistant economic development director; providing more funding for economic development as well as for quality of life programming, such as a fireworks display on July 3 at Smith Park.

Adkins also said the city has seen a drop in crime for the first quarter of 2015; the announcement of the new AK Steel Research and Innovation Center; the opening of the Burlington store at the slowly reviving Towne Mall; a new luxury apartment complex being constructed on the East End; some infrastructure improvements; buildings being renovated and several new businesses opening downtown. A long list of deferred maintenance projects has been prioritized so action can be taken quickly once funding becomes available in the coming years.

“We need to put the pieces into play in a positive way,” he said. “Now it’s just putting the pieces together and take them in order of what, how and in a reasonable time frame.”

Going into year two, Adkins said there will be more focus on how to address a number of those issues, with some being resolved quickly and others over a longer period of time.

Mayor Larry Mulligan and Vice Mayor Joe Mulligan declined to share specifics on Adkins’s performance, but Joe Mulligan said he was “very pleased” with his first-year progress.

“He recognizes the challenges we face, and also sees the great opportunities we have as a city government to improve our community… Doug has set some aggressive goals, and the department heads and staff members are working hard to achieve those goals. We have seen and will continue to see the effect of those efforts in the months and years to come,” he said.