Peter Auger

Naw , the two above don’t mix but since I have been out of the office for a few days I had two updates for one post.

I just returned from a camping trip to Sleeper State Park (thumb area of Michigan). Our youngest daughters had never been camping so we had to rectify that. They both had a great time, but one is more the camping type than the other. Both were tired last night and went to bed without a fight. A good reason to get kids outside, they sleep well.

The camping trip reminded me of what a beautiful State we live in, so much to offer…Did you know that 965 of all State Park camp sites are reserved for this weekend?

The second thing is a traffic reminder. We know football season is getting underway, but it is also still construction season. We are starting work on the Downtown Crosswalk Replacement Project. Work will begin on Tuesday September 8th to replace the brick paver crosswalks with stamped concrete on Auburn Road from Juniper to S. Squirrel Road. All brick paver crosswalks that have not been previously replaced with stamped concrete will be part of this project.

Vehicle traffic will be reduced to one lane in each direction on Auburn Road as work is performed in three phases. At one point, Squirrel Court will be completely closed at Auburn so that the Water Department can concurrently repair a manhole structure while the concrete contractor replaces the crosswalk on the northern side of the Squirrel Ct. and Auburn intersection.

Work is expected to be completed by the end of September. We should be done with the entire project in time for the traditional Avondale Homecoming Game on October 8th.

In years past, the Auburn Hills Chamber of Commerce held their annual Taste event in conjunction with the City’s Summerfest event. This year, they are doing something a little different.

On Thursday, September 16th from 5 to 8pm, the Taste of Auburn Hills event will be held at the Walter P. Chrysler Museum. The event theme is “A Night at the Museum” and will feature local favorites such as Alfoccino’s, and the Palace Grill and will introduce us to some new restaurants like Bar Louie Tavern & Grill and Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill. There will be live music, a mind reader and mentalist and on-site car racing presented by Miniature Motorways.

This even promises to delight food connoisseurs and impress automobile enthusiasts! So if you’ve never had the opportunity to visit the museum or attend any of the past Taste events, this fascinating venue and mouth-watering cuisine will impress you!

Advanced reservations are suggested. Tickets can be purchased online at www.auburnhillschamber.com or by calling 248.853.7862. Tickets are $18 for adults and $5 for children ages 5-12. Children under 5 are free.

Sometimes when you are in my position you do interviews on different topics of interest. I would say that most of the time anything I have to say in interviews ends up on the cutting room floor. Being shy, boring and a face made for radio, I do understand why.

I was pleasantly pleased when I saw Karen Deybis’ interview of yours truly for her Time Magazine’s Detroit Blog.

I have been asked some of these questions by others, so I figured others might want to know.

Hope you enjoy the interview.

History was broken in Auburn Hills this past weekend.  The five year Auburn Hills Police Department softball winning streak came to an abrupt end.  I believe the final tally was Fire Department 15 and the Police Department 10. Yes a defensive struggle to be sure…

So, if you see Fire Department members walking even prouder as they walk around the city this week, there is good reason.

Now the Department of Public Services is crying foul, as they want a role in establishing the athletic prowess of their department.

I understand that the Police Department is licking their wounds and have already refocused to the annual grid iron match up where the Police Department seems to hold advantage.

So congratulations go out to the Fire Department in starting a new softball winning streak (hey, it has to start somewhere).

It’s good to see good competition amongst our organization as long as at the end of the day we come back to all moving in the same direction together.

Oh, DPS, I don’t know why the Police and Firefighters are scared to play you.

This week has been very hectic around our civic center complex. We have been doing a lot of moving. I should clarify the we thing.

We are moving four departments (Treasurers, Clerks, Assessors and Community development) in an effort to consolidate the office space we take up. With the lowering of our labor force it is important that we consolidate where we can to gain any efficiencies and utilize the synergy that is created when bringing employees closer together.

Change is a challenge and I am glad to see some employees having fun with the changes.

The Clerk’s Office and the Treasures office are now moved together and the Assessor’s office has moved to where the Clerks’ office was. We have also connected the two offices to share the front counter the public uses for all three departments.

We then moved the Community Development Department “down the hill” and into the Administration Building where the Assessor was located. The city will see an immediate savings with the reduction of use of the Community Development Building. We should also see an increase of interdepartmental use of the people we have on staff, making all employees more valuable to our organization.

So if you are around the Administrative building on our campus over the next week you may see some boxes and files still being moved and some of our team still adjusting to their new digs.

Opps, I meant to say catch up. Today I am attempting to catch up. I am so far behind a feel like I am looking at the back of my own head. I have been away from my desk or tied up in so many meetings over the past several days it almost seems that I have been away.

I spent some time at a local Fund Raiser for the Auburn Hills Boys & Girls Club. These local groups are so important to our community and add public value and it’s great to see people support them. This club sees about 130 kids a day with a membership just over 1,000 members. Five different communities reap the benefits of this club and members of the club have a 90% high school graduation rate. A great place for our kids to reinforce study, sportsmanship, leadership and good citizenship.

I also took a day to move one of my girls back to college. It’s great to see the youth excited to get out of the house… This will be her first year in her apartment and her dad approves of the housing arrangement (not that this approval is requested).

To add to the days blurring together, one of our younger girls seems to have mono, so sleep seems to be a distance thing of the past. Hope to be back blogging more regular within a day or so.

Now, back t pushing paper…ouch, not another paper cut!

No I am not scrapbooking (now that would be dangerous). While reading this week’s regional papers I see the cutting continuing in communities, closing on Fridays, 2.5% pay cuts, furlough days, even one community yesterday receive 15% pay concessions.  

These are challenging times and we are all doing things different. It was frustrating last month when the States Chief Deputy Treasurer told a group of us city managers that the State is the only government body that has been cutting and that city’s and local governments will have to start.

We in local government are probably ahead of the State on these issues, but maybe we have told our story enough.

In Auburn Hills it was the late 1990’s when we shifted from defined benefit pensions to a define contribution plan. We also have a team of employees from all different employment groups that meets to review our health care costs and recommends ways to improve our benefits while saving the city money.

We have also not replaced people as they leave (attrition) or retire. This does not mean that we never hire anyone, but we look each and every time to see if the technological advances or the learning curve in our operations allow us to move the organization with less people.

This has been working. I am not saying this has not had issues, but we work through them. As we put together the 2011 budget the trend continues. Our 2010 budget year had 177 full time employee (FTE) positions. As of now the 2011 budget has 169 FTEs, that a reduction of 8 more employees. Just in the past few years we have reduced that number of FTE’s by 15.

Our employees are very proud that so far we have not reduced the services or programs that we are famous for. We will continue to match revenues versus the expenses, not because it’s easy, but because it is the right thing to do.

More to come on the budgets

Interesting day at the office yesterday with the announcement of the Ilitch’s making it official they are interested in acquiring the Pistons.

So it would seem appropriate for today’s blog to respond to yesterday’s news that the Pistons franchise maybe purchased by Detroit sports magnate Mike Ilitch.

I think it is great that a Michigan based entrepreneur and sports lover wants to buy the Pistons. The Ilitch family is a true and staunch supporter of Detroit area professional sports and this opportunity to expand his legacy into Oakland County (if the purchase of the Pistons includes maintaining the Palace as its home base).

It is all about the Auburn Hills Advantage, we know business. We run our organization based on sound business cases. This is one of the reason we have 22 business parks in the city representing corporations from over 30 different countries.  And with what I know, I think the best business case exists for keeping the Pistons in Auburn Hills, but not for moving the team to Downtown Detroit, as has been speculated. 

Just the economy of our state and indeed the nation does not position any community – much less Detroit, with its longstanding fiscal crisis – to embark on a new, taxpayer subsidized sports and entertainment venue. I know if we just borrow or leverage some $400 million or so more we will never need any more money to raise the region up to where it was.

Really? That’s all it would take? Just a half billion more, please. 

The award-winning Palace, just 25 miles north of Detroit,  is self-funded, pays taxes and is regarded as one of the finest sports and entertainment venues in the world. The Palace opened in 1988 and was built by the late Pistons’ owner Bill Davidson and a group of private investors; no taxpayer dollars were used. It has garnered numerous nominations and awards as a sport and entertainment venue and is consistently one of North America’s top-grossing arenas. Neither taxpayers in Auburn Hills or the State of Michigan assumed any long-term debt in association with the Palace. On the contrary, the City of Auburn Hills is using only 4.3% of its debt capacity and recently received a bond rating upgrade, despite challenging economic times.

Something that is rarely discussed is security costs for policing Detroit’s existing stadiums.

While the Palace currently pays the City of Auburn Hills for police coverage, the City of Detroit absorbs police costs of $1.5 million annually for coverage at Joe Louis, Comerica Park and Ford Field.

I don’t think this is an Auburn Hills City versus Detroit thing. Municipalities have to be fiscally responsible and offer value and provide essential services to residents and local businesses. We have to balance our books and ensure any long term legacy cost is budgeted for. But the days of handouts and subsidies have to stop sometime and Mr. Davidson’s experiment of running a privately owned stadium surprised the industry and was even more successful than he envisioned, or maybe not, maybe he knew if he built it right, kept it up to date and provide what the public wanted…ah yes, back to the best business case.

I had an interesting conversation with a resident this week and I didn’t have all the answers, but that is ok too.

They were inquiring as to why we don’t have one waste hauler for all the City residents. There is a lot of history behind this topic as our community has wrestled with this particular issue at least three times.

We still have what is considered an “open market” where as long as the company is licensed with us and have the appropriate vehicles, people have the opportunity to contract with whom they want to take waste away from their residents. I believe we have about a half-dozen of these companies in this category.

The conversation was timely due to our City Council exploring this issue again. We have been looking at it for over a year in this iteration. With our neighboring community of Rochester Hills making the transition a year ago, it has given us a golden opportunity to witness in real-time some of the advantages and disadvantages of the process and the services. We have had an open dialog with the elected officials of Rochester Hills and even some of their residents (People who were not initially favor of the change).

Some people may not understand why a municipality looks at this type of system. In these tight budget times, we have to scale back all operations and that includes what we spend on our infrastructure. One of the largest advantages of a single source-hauler system for us involves our local roads. Local roads are designed different than major roads. These roads are design for residential traffic. The more heavy vehicles we have on these roads the more wear and tear on the life of these roads.

Another reason seems more aesthetic, but makes sense when I think about it. A uniformed schedule means waste in residential areas would be put out on one day instead of putting trash out every day.

Look for some public discussion to be occuring in late September.  The City Council is having very good dialog on this issue and we look forward to more information soon.

Budget sure doesn’t get easier.

Well wait a minute, let me take that back. Our budget process that we are going through for 2011 is not easy, but it is great when our staff understands the real world we live in and budgets accordingly. It also helps when our finance department works with the departments and continues to improve our budget process.

The decisions sometime are not easy. We have to face that in these economic times the revenues are not there that used to be there. The solution is we don’t’ spend like we used to.

Our City Council has sent the message that they may pass a budget, but if it doesn’t have to be spent, don’t spend it. Over the last two years our staff has showed that they have heard council and brought the city’s budgets under approved amounts.

We continue to look at things under a microscope and match our expenditure to the revenues. This process has forced us to look at how we do things. We purchase through joint bidding procedures with other municipalities, we continue to benchmark the levels of services versus the cost. We work with our employees to help keep personnel cost down and we look at consolidation and other strategies to keep reinventing ourselves as a great organization.

So these times encourage us to adapt, be innovative and overcome the challenges before us.