Not just doing, but doing better
Published 12:00 pm Wednesday, July 14, 2004
New city boss Mary Jo Briggs knows the public service challenge.
Her climb to bureaucracy’s peak began at its absolute base – as a lowly “temp” worker.
But the first task Mary Jo Briggs faced as a “management analyst” – devising standards by which to gauge organizational success – is still, in its own way, the one before her.
“Twenty-three years later, I’m still working on it,” she said. “But I have more ideas now.”
Briggs began her residency last week as Bainbridge Island’s top bureaucrat, settling into the office of city administrator. She succeeds interim administrator Lee Walton; her hiring leaves just the finance director’s post yet to be filled in a year-long shake-up of top management.
She comes to the city after three years as administrator for the city of Fairview, Ore., a fast-growing Portland suburb. That stint was preceded by two decades with the city of Vancouver, Wash.
Upon her recruitment to Bainbridge, she was praised by Fairview Mayor Mike Weatherby as “without a doubt the best CEO I ever worked with.”
But while career bureaucrats are often turned out on the lathe of university MPA programs, Briggs’ ascension followed a less deliberate path.
She earned a degree in English and education at the University of Nebraska, and began her professional career as a junior high school teacher in that state.
When she and her husband Bob – high school sweeties – moved to the Portland, Ore. area in the late 1970s, she took a temporary job with Vancouver’s municipal government.
She was hired to figure out whether the city was “doing its job” well; she found that both the organization and the public it served were largely unable to recognize successes, and that the city was unable to “tell its story” in a coherent manner.
“They were too busy ‘doing,’” Briggs said. “Any city that’s in a period of high growth, you get too busy ‘doing’ and you don’t have a chance to communicate.”
That began a career-long focus on seeking out public feedback, whether at work or on the street corner. And her taste for public service stuck; Briggs worked her way through the city organizational chart, as operations manager, assistant public works director, and interim and finally deputy city manager.
Annexation – which she engineered – during that time doubled Vancouver’s population to 120,000 residents, and the ranks of city employees swelled to some 700.
And supplementing her skills with accounting courses at Portland State, she also spent two years overseeing that city’s $273 million budget.
Briggs is modest to the point of self-deprecation, describing each promotion to a more prestigious post by saying, “I applied, and they let me do it.”
“I’ve been really fortunate along the way,” she said. “I always like the tasks nobody else wants to do. I like doing the weird assignments. It keeps life lively.”
She has been praised for her skills as an arbitrator, navigating disputes to steer the parties to sound resolutions. She cites such an instance as one of her professional achievements.
When the city of Vancouver sought to enact a real estate excise tax to fund park development, the proposal ran headlong into business, realty and construction lobbies; Briggs brokered political peace.
“Twenty-two parks happened because of it that wouldn’t have happened before,” she said.
Briggs was recruited to Bainbridge by an executive search firm; she will work on a contract basis, although terms of her contract were not disclosed by the mayor’s office this week.
And while the mayor and others were checking up on Briggs, she was using the professional grapevine to check up on Bainbridge Island.
She was intrigued by the challenges inherent in a city organization still trying to define itself 13 years after incorporation, and a citizenry motivated enough to turn out to meetings even when “a new prison, landfill or group home” isn’t on the agenda.
She cites the city’s $8 million open space bond as a signature Bainbridge achievement.
“This is a community that speaks its values,” she said, “but has actions that back it up, from what I can see so far.”
Briggs and her husband, an engineer with the Washington State Department of Transportation, are scouting out island homes and will celebrate their 29th anniversary in August.
Their youngest son Kelly is a junior studying child psychology at the University of Montana; he also serves in the Oregon Air National Guard. Son Christopher is a project manager with a Vancouver, Wash., development company, and does search-and-rescue on Mount St. Helens.
Briggs credits their success to “95 percent good luck, and 5 percent good parenting.”
She enjoys sailing, skiing, working out, and reading “mindless detective novels.”
And at City Hall, the challenges of that first public sector job remain.
She takes the administrator’s post in time for 2005 budgeting, a microcosmic exercise in the competing interests of the public sphere. It begins with an examination of core services – what’s being done. What’s being done well, and how to improve what isn’t, that may well follow.
“I believe in building relationships,” Briggs said. “Structure follows the relationships.
“Structure works when relationships are strong, and I hope that still works for me.”
