Oneida County mulls new organizational structure

News analysis

While the Northwoods of Wisconsin has a strong identifiable character that has pretty much persisted for the entirety of the state’s existence — its forests, its lakes, its lumberjack lore — the same cannot be said of Oneida County government, which every decade or so goes through some soul searching to try and find its true self.

Last time around, some 12 years ago, the county’s brain trust hired an administrative coordinator to run things day-to-day, but don’t ask how that turned out. Since that short stint ended, for more than a decade now, the county has operated with a diminished, almost nonexistent role for the coordinator, basically a title the human resources director holds in name only.

Now the county’s soul is searching for itself again.

Earlier this year the county hired the consulting team of Allyson Brunette and Karen Harkness to perform a so-called Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis, and to provide options for a potential restructuring of county government, if the county decides to restructure at all. 

After their report was presented to the county board at its October meeting, the administration committee has taken up the burden of the soul searching, and will make a presentation and recommendations to the county board early next year.

In a nutshell, the county has but a few options, for there are only three organizational structures available to Wisconsin counties. There can be an elected county executive who runs the show — no one in Oneida County has called for that — there can be a county administrator, a supervisory figure who runs the county day-to-day; or there can be an administrative coordinator, which as noted, after the last full-time coordinator left in 2011, is basically in name only.

In other words, no one runs the county day to day, though in that vacuum the elected county board chairman retains the most power and comes closest to an executive in charge.

Results and options

At the October county board meeting, Brunette unveiled the results of the SWOT analysis, stressing the consultants’ roles as facilitators of interviews and workshops and of advancing the decision-making process. 

“So we first engaged in soliciting one-on-one feedback through anonymous surveys, which were online for both staff as well as for elected officials,” Brunette said. “And then we were here for three days in July conducting one-on-one interviews. So those were in person, the rest were over Zoom in the month of July.”

After that, they facilitated two workshops at the sheriff's department in August where they worked through the organizational SWOT analysis and divided participants into six working groups.

“That was based on what we heard through those surveys and through those interviews,” she said. “And then we spent the last month of September assembling and generating a final report for you.”

Brunette stressed that their role was to listen and interpret only.

“We don’t nudge you in a direction,” she said. “We propose a variety of directions and then gauge your reactions. We understand fully that these are your constituents in your communities that you’re representing. So at the end of the day, the buck stops with you.”

That means making sense of the chaos, Brunette said, putting together various perspectives to give the organization functional options: “And lastly, we are here to paint a clear picture of what your options are, not to push you toward one option in particular.”

The first priority, Brunette said, was to make sure everyone had a chance to participate.

“We don’t sugarcoat what we hear and we give you a chance to react and to respond to what we heard,” she said. “So I think I used the description back in August at our workshops of saying doing the SWOT analysis is a little bit like ripping a bandaid off because sometimes you hear good things and sometimes you hear bad things, but if you don’t take the Band-Aid off, you can’t heal.”

But Brunette reminded supervisors that changing their management structure, if that is what they wanted to do, would not be a silver bullet.

“You can enhance, refine, or adopt new processes,” she said. “You can add technology, which is not always necessarily like computers or phones. It really means tools. You can change the tools people use to do a job or you can implement new people, you can move people around, you can change roles.”

Brunette said one thing the consultants realized was how important the culture of fiscal conservatism is within the county, and she said the consultants wanted to make sure they gave the county tools that supported and aligned with those values. 

All in all, Brunette said, across two workshops, 25 different scenarios emerged that might address organizational opportunities, weaknesses, and threats, and roughly two thirds of them were ones that supervisors and departments felt interested in and expressed either a high level of interest in implementing or in implementing in the short to midterm future. 

“And about one third you said, ‘Nope, this isn’t a good fit for us,’” she said. “And that’s okay. That’s really not a bad average for two out of three. So like I said, some ideas were well received, some were neutral and some were a hard no.”

For example, reducing the number of county committees was a hard no, as was assigning more citizens seats to committees. The idea of a unified message to be released by the board chairman or county administrator’s office once a month to express a unified voice and to “correct misinformation” was also rejected.

But strongly recommended were solutions such as a budget boot camp for supervisors, a training manual for new and veteran supervisors, and the creation of a recommendation system whereby supervisors recommend one person in their wards quarterly who might be appropriate for a committee or volunteer role in county government.

The management model

The recommendations of what might be called best practices were discussed, but the heart of the report was the management model itself and the direction the county might want to go.

“So if you have a stronger management model, you’re going to have a stronger team,” Brunette said. “If you have a stronger team, you’re going to have stronger performance. If you have a stronger board, you’re going to have better decision making, right? So that was our goal, to find the intersection between all of those elements.”

Brunette said that required getting into the meat and potatoes of the functional differences between a county administrator and a county administrative coordinator. There are three models of county management in the state of Wisconsin, Brunette said.

Participants nixed one of the models, an elected executive, right away. That left two options.

“The county administrative coordinator model, which has a strong county board chairman, is your current model,” she said. “And then a county administrator model is where you have an appointed executive. So you asked us to weigh between the two, what are the pros and cons and how would it influence our operation to consider either?”

In their workshops, participants had been divided into six groups, and Brunette said the one thing all groups had agreed upon was that more people need to be dedicated to management, which means there needs to be at least one more staff person in management. 

In that context, Brunette started with a redefined county administrative coordinator model. 

“Now the first model would be to go back to a model that’s similar to what you used to have where you separate the administrative coordinator role from the LRES director, which is how it was at one point,” she said. “The administrative coordinator separation would first and foremost lighten the county board shared workload by performing performance evaluations for department heads and assisting the finance department with additional budget assembly.”

Brunette the important difference between the coordinator and an administrator’s role is the difference between coordination and supervision.

“The coordinator coordinates and manages but does not supervise, so they’re not their boss, but they need to work together functionally to coordinate and run county operations effectively,” she said. 

In the coordinator model, Brunette said, the coordinator acts as sort of a buffer between elected officials and departments. 

“I’m not going to throw anyone under the bus, but we heard from a lot of department heads that some love the political exposure of their role working directly with the county board and others kind of wish there was a little bit of a buffer,” she said. “Maybe they don’t relish the political exposure of their role. They feel like they answer to their entire committee and the county board and they have multiple bosses. It’s confusing about the chain of command.”

Under the coordinator scenario, Brunette said, department heads are coordinated by the administrative coordinator, and the administrative coordinator is the go-to point of contact for both county board members that have questions about department operations and for department heads to the county board.

More power …

Half of the groups in the workshops opted for shifting to a county administrator model, and a county administrator does more, Brunette said.

“The county administrator would manage hiring and firing, which is a large shift from the current balance of power,” she said. “They would also assume the role of public information officer in an emergency, a role which is sort of not on paper but operationally jointly shared between the county board chair and the sheriff.”

In both scenarios, constitutional officers still report to the public because they are elected but Brunette said it was critical that they work functionally with an administrator or a county administrative coordinator, even though they do not report to them.

“They are still colleagues working for the greater good of the county,” she said.

Under a county administrator, Brunette said there is overlap between human resources and administration and so they recommended creating a new administration department that would absorb human resources. 

“And this is due to the fact that LRES and administration have more blurred lines in this scenario,” she said. “You’ll recall that the administrator would have chief duties in hiring and firing as well as performance evaluations. It just makes more functional sense that these are absorbed, and again, just like with the last model, it’s formalizing this buffer or sieve between staff and elected officials so that elected officials can focus on policy making and not focus on operational.”

If the county hires an administrative coordinator, they need someone with a good deal of executive organizational skills, Brunette said. 

“The administrative coordinator would have a leadership and organizational development function in succession planning, mentoring and strengthening the team of leaders,” she said. “The administrative coordinator would take some things off the county board chair’s plate without the chair relinquishing their strong leadership role.”

A coordinator would aid in hiring and staffing but would not have complete control, and the goal would not be to supervise or micromanage staff but to help them to find efficiencies, Brunette said — collaboration and funding as well as, when desired, acting as the buffer so that department heads can do their job.

And that brought up an important point, Brunette said: “This is only going to work with either model if you have buy-in from your department heads.”

“You have extremely competent department heads, but they’re used to not having a boss, so to speak,” she said. “So they’re independent, they’re competent, they get their work done, they report to their committees of jurisdiction. Due to the nature of how this discussion came about, some department heads felt a little bit blindsided and they felt like ‘what’s wrong? If there’s a problem, why haven’t we heard about it? Why are we fixing something that’s not broken?’”

So the buy-in is needed, Brunette said.

“If they don’t buy in, it’s going to feel like a punishment,” she said. “So in order for it to not feel like a punishment, we need to show department heads how this will benefit them without seeming like you’re not. We’re creating a new level of management. So department heads need to feel like this isn’t somebody watching over me and finding these flaws, but somebody who’s here to support me, protect me, and enable me to do my best work.”

A county administrator would be a big shift culturally for the county, Brunette said.

”So we highly recommend that should you go with this model, you only consider candidates with local government management experience because it is going to be a big cultural shift in this model,” she said. “It will be a new boss for the department heads. The county administrative coordinator is coordinating not managing, whereas an administrator is a supervisor.”

Brunette said the county needed to be prepared for a long transition because success would not come overnight. 

“There might be some resistance and, like any change, sometimes it comes with a little bit of pain,” she said. “This candidate should have strong exposure to human resources because we do recommend this consolidation to include a new administration department that includes [human resources], but the leadership development of the county board would shift to the county board chair, whereas organizational power and hiring and firing, budget assembly, and performance evaluations would all shift to the county administrator.” 

More power, more money …

A really painful question was the fiscal reality of reorganization.

“Creating either goal will mean the necessary addition of more FTEs [full-time equivalents] for the county,” she said. “It would be a more expensive option and there’s not a right or wrong option, but I just want to be straight up with you. A county administrator’s salary, including benefits, would likely exceed $200,000 annually. Many administrators, at least the good ones that have experience, are also going to negotiate contracts that include severance pay. … So I just want to be straight up about that. That’s what you can expect if you’re hiring someone with that professional level of experience.”

Instead of viewing that as just a drain on the budget, Brunette said, supervisors could flip the mindset and view it as a gain.

“What do you gain from this investment?” she asked. “Rather than say, ‘oh god, we’re sinking a couple hundred thousand dollars into salary and benefits,’ what you gain through this investment is more holistic insights for county board members on all department committees, not just the committees you serve on.”

Professional management experience will bring change in management, leadership development, and succession planning to the team and will lessen the workload on performance management tasks for the county board chairperson, Brunette said.

 “It’s a good investment that we feel enhances processes to onboard new county board members and guide their decision making,” she said. “And hopefully develop a pipeline of internal talent for those leadership roles when retirements do happen, and community talent that expresses interest in being civically engaged and giving back by running for county board and greater assurance that things are being executed as efficiently, legally and fiscally wisely as possible through greater collaboration.”

What it all boils down to, Brunette said, is that the county board needs to be clear about what it wants that individual to focus their efforts on first. 

“So if and when you choose to hire someone, whatever that title is, you need to be clear about what you want them to do in a hundred days, 365 days,” she said. “You as the organization as a whole want trust to be strong between the board and staff, not fractured. You want them to buy into this process and feel like it benefits them.”

But don’t expect a 180-degree turn overnight, Brunette said. 

“It will take time to see results and change management,” she said. “It can feel like a slog at first because sometimes it feels like it gets worse before it gets better and you get to determine the strength of the role in either case. Even if you opt for a county administrator role, there is home rule at work here. So you can tighten or loosen the reins to strengthen and empower that role or keep it on a shorter leash if you will.”

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.