10-Year Plan: Dickert's broken promise

What's a plan?

That's the question Alderman Terry McCarthy raised this morning in The Journal Times in response to the document Mayor John Dickert released this week. Here's McCarthy's comment, as written by reporter Paul Sloth: 

A plan is to accomplish something specific. It would include the specific steps to get that goal. The use of the word plan might be a little loose. From that perspective, his definition of plan and my definition of plan might be different.

Aside from the hundred or so comments posted on RacinePost and the JT's website, that was the closest thing to criticism Sloth could find to the mayor's 10-year plan. While Sloth dismisses McCarthy's comments as "minor criticism," it's an important question.

Is the document Dickert released a "plan" for the city?

We've spent the last two days talking to community members and officials searching for an answer to this question. Each raised concerns that can be broken down into three categories:

1. Process. The mayor's 10-year plan for the city was written as a campaign piece, not as a working document for the community. He spent 15 months ignoring a campaign promise, then, fearful of not getting re-elected, released a rambling document without community input or City Council review. It's not a 10-year city plan. It's a campaign lit piece released, at no cost, by the JT.

Dennis Dresang, professor emeritus in political science at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, hit on this point in the JT. Here's his comment, as reported by Sloth:

It is highly unusual for an individual and particularly an elected official to write THE plan. Typically the process is important. Ideally elected officials should be leading a serious dialogue with the community about what kind of community do we want to have and is it realistic.

Dickert led no discussion and sought no input. It's a missed opportunity. He could have led a meaningful, needed, community discussion about Racine's future. Instead, he held a dialogue with himself. 

2. Presentation. The document itself is poorly done. The writing is incomplete and grammatically challenged, the formatting is, at best, inconsistent, some information is repeated twice, and the layout is non-existent. (One example: Page 4 calls for a diagram, but there's no actual diagram.) Consider this section, taken verbatim, from the 10-year plan:

Narrative – When we stat this journey to implement the 10 year plan we are beginning with the following statistics

1. Unemployment at 17.5 %.

2. We have been rated #2 in the state in unemployment since the 1990’s.

3. The cities manufacturing base has decline by 8,000 jobs.

4. City spending was up 25% from $33.3 Million to $44.3 million since 2000.

5. Racine has seen only 11% growth in the last 30 years. Compared to the State’s 21%.

We're the last people to criticize someone for grammatical errors (surely, there are a bunch on this site), but this is supposed to be the guiding document for the city for the next 10 years. Would it hurt to have someone go through and correct spelling and grammatical errors?

Now read the full document. How would Dickert present this to the community? Service clubs? Business leaders? The City Council? You wouldn't even get laughed out of CNH's or SC Johnson's board rooms because there's no way their boards would take something like this up.

Compare Dickert's "plan" to the "North Star Vision" Dr. James Shaw implemented at Racine Unified. Shaw offered a clearly stated vision, supporting documents and an actual "Scorecard" for the School Board and community to grade him against. It's a professional, coherent vision that Shaw spent the last two years developing and communicating to staff, students and the community.

Another example is the Racine County Workforce Development Board's "Higher Expectations" strategic plan, which laid out a countywide strategy to create a competitive local workforce. The plan identified six "Calls to Action," and led to programs such as "Advancing Family Assets," which is working to help families break out of poverty. The 10-year strategic plan was written by a coalition of community stakeholders and contained clearly measurable outcomes. A one-year progress report on the plan was held at Wingspread in 2009.

Dickert's plan more closely resembles the widely panned NAACP "report" on Downtown Racine. Dickert refused to even read that document because it wasn't approved by the organization. That leads to an interesting question: Who approved Dickert's plan? Why should anyone take it seriously?

3. Benchmarking. Dickert made a big point in the Journal Times to say he wants the community to "benchmark" him with the plan. Amazingly, there's nothing in the plan to "benchmark." He sets no timetables for his initiatives and sets few goals for the city to reach. Apparently city residents are supposed to hold him accountable in 10 years - after they re-elect him twice, of course.

Taken together, the mayor's 10-year plan is either severely flawed or simply not a plan. In either case, he hasn't lived up to his campaign promise.

A few more notes on the plan, as released:

• Dickert told the JT he was watching Des Moines, Iowa; Austin, Texas; and Seattle for tips on how to transform Racine into a Top 10 city. His plan apparently involves luring the Wisconsin state capitol to Racine, opening one of the country's largest research universities, and creating a legendary local music scene. Otherwise, comparing Racine in any way to those cities is pretty silly. 
• What's personally surprising about the first two days of coverage is how closely it's following the arrangement between the JT and Dickert described to me by insiders. The paper would launch an "exclusive" front page package of stories, then follow-up with stories laying out the plan. So far, that's what we've seen. If expectations hold we'll see glowing future stories about specific aspects of the plan, such as the mayor's long-term parks planning.
• All of the numbers included in Dickert's 10-year plan came from Money magazine's 2010 "Best Places to Live" issue.

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