On March 15, more than three months after her election, Mayor Sharon Weston Broome’s transition team leaders finally released the reports from 21 transition team committees appointed back in mid-December.
“The release of the reports, or rather the obfuscation surrounding their release, may seem like an insignificant issue in a new mayoral administration trying to get its arms around running a city,” writes Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel in her latest column. “But little things often say a lot about what’s going on behind the scenes and, more importantly, how things are going to be for the next four years.”
The reports were supposed to be due to the mayor’s transition team leaders on Jan. 31, Riegel notes.
“Now that the first quarter of 2017 is nearly over, the transition team reports are being released to the public. It’s better later than never. But, really, why did this take six weeks?” Riegel writes. “Why the conflicting, contradictory statements? Why so much confusion over something so simple and, let’s face it, something that may prove inconsequential?”
Riegel says she’s not trying to pick a fight with a new administration that is, by all accounts, truly working and trying hard.
“But transparency and timely, consistent, sensible responses to requests for public information are paramount to success. Transition team reports are low hanging fruit, easy to feed to a hungry media and a public that still harbors good will toward the new mayor,” she writes. “If something so relatively simple is clouded by so much doublespeak and disconnect, what happens when there’s a real crisis and a real need for solid, straightforward information from an administration with a clear chain of command?”
Read the full column. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
