Last week, changes in the structure of the City of Plant City continued as several new appointments and promotions officially happened.
When City Manager Bill McDaniel took the reins of the city in 2018, he came on board with one overarching mission: to successfully execute a “deep dive.” It was a lofty goal and one that much of city staff quickly got on board with.
Essentially, McDaniel wanted to spend time combing through every aspect of the city to determine where there was room for improvement, where it excelled and where there were holes that needed filled.
Part of that dive has come with reshuffling. He began by rearranging departments and cleaned up the lines of communication of reporting so there was a more synergetic flow. Certain departments were taken under the wing of the city manager and others were removed and reassigned.
Now the reorganization is continuing.
“I just created a Professional Standards Division and I’ve promoted Tray Towles to director of Professional Standard,” McDaniel said. “It’s very timely and you take what we were talking about with the police department receiving this high level of accreditation — that is professional standard. It is developing written procedures, standard operating procedures for the entire organization so that everything is documented, codified, standardized so everybody knows what to do, how to do it and what is expected of them.”
Towles had been the director of code enforcement and now will have the Community Engagement Center under his leadership to assist him with the process of polishing the city to excellence via its clerical support. He will work closely with McDaniel and then each topic, as it arises, will be managed by Towles, McDaniel and the subject matter’s directors. The assistant city managers will also assist in the review process.
Tina Barber, who has worked with the city as a code enforcement officer, is now the interim director for the department following Towles’ promotion. McDaniel said the goal in all of the reshuffling is to raise the bar, to bring the idea and the product of accreditation to the entire organization.
Even in the areas where there is no official accreditation to achieve, he believes having a standardized high level of expectation will create order across the entire operation.
Plant City Fire Rescue is already in the process of working toward accreditation and Assistant City Manager Rick Lilyquist is working on APWA accreditation for engineering, solid waste and stormwater and potentially utilities.
The city has also added a new position in the engineering department to “give more horsepower in development review” since the department handles all the site plans. An Engineer I position was created and filled with a promoted internal candidate, and the city will backfill the Engineering Projects Coordinator Position by that promotion.
“That will give us a little more capacity with our development review because we are getting hit with the volume, the number of projects we are getting, plus the complexity is combining to really start to bog down the system,” McDaniel said.
McDaniel also added a Capital Improvements Projects Manager in engineering. He said if you broke down all of the projects they were managing and you realized that two project managers were having to juggle that massive volume, it became clear another position was needed. He admitted adding a third still would probably not fully alleviate the massive load, but it would “divide that workload into manageable chunks.”
An administrative assistant position was also added in the Planning and Zoning Department because some of the city’s highly skilled planners were frequently sitting working the front window to grant fence permits or other mundane applications because there was no one to fill the need.
The simple changes, McDaniel said, will add value to the organization at several different levels and hopefully help bring the city toward the future.
“It’s a tweaking of the dials more than anything,” McDaniel said. “It gives me the ability and the organization the ability to A) keep up with the demands we are getting from the development side, plus I’m also committing to and I’m making more progress on my Deep Dive to build the organization of the future. You’re not going to get there if you don’t get some of these things standardized.”