Karl McCollester (00:06)
Welcome to Mighty Municipalities, the podcast about small municipalities and how they can punch above their weight. I'm your host, Carl McCallstern, along with my co-host Mark Partin and our guests. We take you through the highs and lows of working in a small municipality. Whether it's the hardship and frustration that is holding you back or the progress and wins that are propelling you forward, we're here to share the lessons learned and give you the strategies to help improve your community.

Mark, how are you doing this fine live recording afternoon immediately after the Municipal Association of South Carolina conference? Doing very well. It's a warm day in Greenville, South Carolina, where we are currently, but everything has gone well and we are gladly recording in an air-conditioned setting, not outdoors.

on Main Street. No kidding, yeah. We've both had our walks up and down that street here the past couple days and it is South Carolina in July. That's correct. It is it is not in that case. Correct. Yes, absolutely. So the format was a little bit different this this year Mark what what do you think of it? Yeah this actually is second year I remember they made the change last year but I really like the way they re oriented the schedule of the municipal association

conference in that we had the opening session on Thursday afternoon as opposed to Friday morning and then it followed into on Friday while we did have a general session to start the day off then the afternoon sessions were concurrent sessions with relevant topics that you could select from depending on what your interests were or maybe what your community's needs were that you could then go to. And so I think it gives a lot more flexibility

for those people who maybe are not able to attend the whole week end of sessions, but they're able to pick and choose and customize their schedule a little better to suit their needs. so and then this morning again was a few concurrent sessions and then had a lunch for recognizing award winners. So I like the flow of the schedule and I hope we maintain it in the years to come. Yeah and I think one other thing I've heard from some of the other guests

so every year the municipal association has one or two trips for people to tour local towns see what they've been doing this year was traveler's rest and I think there was a second one and I know a lot of people appreciated those things especially again recognizing this is a July those tours being in the morning versus the height after of the afternoon because I think I remember

North Augusta that was in the afternoon and it was a much hotter time. So Simpsonville there it which is just right down the interstate here. So I think that was a a great way to recognize putting those things on the right time of day when you know you're gonna be outside. So so it was great. So yeah, so for the opening session, which I did get a chance to attend, I think the main thing Todd Glover, the executive director, came up and gave a couple of remarks.

he mentioned he normally doesn't talk about the legislative session because they've already done legislative action day and things like that. But with everything that's gone on with this legislative session, he wanted to share and talk about a couple things. One was I think the current stalemate about the budget, and whether earmarks or projects that are funding that's designated for projects for municipalities is going to happen or not. I think that's still up in the air right now.

especially in election year those kind of things don't always look great, and people don't really love them. So we're waiting to find out about that. And then the other thing he talked about was taxes. one of the big pushes at the state legislature level is to reduce the tax burden of citizens of the state.

What they're currently looking at passing, starting with tripling the homestead exemption for seniors, is very much focused on the property tax, which is what's collected by the cities and counties, not what is directly collected by the state. And while they've added a homestead exemption in the past, and that was offset by state directly funding the difference,

there's talk about whether that's gonna be the the case moving forward, whether that will be reimbursed at all or whether that'll re be reimbursed with a tail off at some point where you know those monies eventually go away. And I think that's especially given the

Behavior of the legislature in the past, and in the past we're talking about I think what at least 15 years ago now, I think it was. Yeah, when the state was having funding issues, they chose not to fund all of those committed fundings back to the local governments despite there being a law on the books that says they should. I think everybody's concerned that if we get into a situation like that again, it'll be a tempting target to

to put the burden on the municipalities instead of on the state as a easy way to offset. So that's something that obviously the municipal association feels like should be in the control of the municipalities to decide how much they're collecting. and that

stay with municipalities as the home rule bill says unless the state does otherwise. Yes, I think from my memory that last episode you were talking about where the the municipal funds were cut was during the Great Recession, so around the two thousand eight to ten ish period. Yeah. So it has been It has been a while and they and the state has been great about funding it fully ever since then. so

But it is still something e everybody has long memories, especially if you've been in local government for a while. So that does not go away immediately. so that was the really the end of day one, I believe. I didn't get to attend many of the sessions. but you got attend what are some of the things you heard? Yeah, the opening session

on Friday morning was a keynote speaker by the name of Doug Griffiths, who's from Alberta, Canada, and he wrote a book called Thirteen Ways to Kill Your Community. And often we hear about those type books focusing just on a downtown district, but this was really your whole community

being targeted. So what he wrote about was he he flipped it around instead of do this to grow your community. He's saying if you do these things you will kill your community. And while I'm not able to rattle off the full thirteen now, the some of the items he spoke of was like if your downtown or your commercial district is maybe older and run down, paint it.

And and on the flip side he said, don't paint, and that is one thing that will kill your community. So he said, Don't worry about the inside of the buildings until you need them, but create the facade that is welcoming and bright and cheerful and that will help your community grow. And then he spoke about the lack of competition in small communities. and he gave an example of a gas station and grocery store and research research shows research that he had conducted

that communities that only had one gas station or one grocery store because they had less competition they actually hurt their community and in many cases they would end up going out of business. He said because in the case of the gas station that he shared as an example, they were charging five cent more per gallon than you could go to the neighboring town and get. So people were going to the neighboring town while they were there, not only were they buying gas, they were buying

clothes and groceries and supplies. so by only having one, they were inhibiting competition and making it more difficult for local residents to

access to things. So he was saying while it may feel like it will hurt that merchant, it actually won't. It'll hurt the community and the merchant. So that was one example he gave and then he gave examples of you know friendliness, doing things to invite communities to town.

Don't welcome people. He said if you don't want your community to grow, then don't welcome people. don't focus on

the younger generation focus only on the people who have been there a long time because he said if you don't give young people a reason to either stay or come to your community they won't. They're going to go somewhere else. so I highly recommend this book and I I probably have butchered the summary of his thirteen ways to kill your community, but it was really a powerful presentation and his book is available for sale directly from him or through Amazon.

titled 13 ways to kill your community and I highly recommend you you get that book whether you're in local government or if you're in just you know private business yourself I think it would be powerful. Nice. you when you talk about the gas station I mean what a great opportunity for the mayor regardless of form of government to use their bully pulpit to go talk to that gas station owner especially if they have business license and they know exactly who the owner is in South Carolina and then

have a bunch of people come up with signs and protest the cost of the gas being higher than neighboring town just to get those things back in line and and make it more reasonable. Same thing for grocery prices if that's what's happening. Have that private discussion first but potentially use that power of communication with your constituents to help the owner who's being short sighted about potential profits be see the long term value

value of of being competitive within the community and then praise them for it right So I think that's that's a great thing. your conversation also reminds me I was talking with one of the council members from McCormick at the Tuesday night welcoming reception and he was talking about how he when he had come in most of the citizens he was speaking with were like

It's just terrible here. There's nothing happening. And he said, Well, wait a minute, you what about this, this, and this? And so what he described is how relentless he was in every conversation he had with citizens of talking about the upside, talking about how great it is to live in McCormick, 'cause he's lived away for a number of years and he came back

as as many people do to you know help their families and has really taken ownership of you know making McCormick a really great place to be. So shout out to him. but also that that same sort of attitude can be critical, even those one on one conversations, especially in a small community, you can really help to change the overall attitude of the community just by having those types of conversations. And and when people are complaining, hear them but also gently push back and talk about all the good things that are happening and and make sure they've heard about the new thing we've done with the park or

the painting of the facades and things like that so that people understand and notice the good things that are happening because lots of times it's very easy if you've had a a negative opinion of your community to instead of seeing all the new things just still be sitting on your original thesis of this is right I yeah exactly it's it's been bad it was bad for the last 15

years and man it may have gotten a lot better but it still feels bad to me because I'm still on that mentality. So helping switch that mentality to your constituents can be incredibly powerful thing towards attracting new people, attracting new businesses and improving quality of life. Yeah since you mentioned that one of the topics he was talking about was don't provide good water.

And if you don't, your community will die. Right. And I and as he mentioned I never thought of it this way, but he talked about people expect good water. So if you tell them, say you replace a water plant or expand a water plant or replace distribution lines and you celebrate that as we have a new and improved system, then they immediately go to well what was wrong with the old system? Were you selling us bad water? Right. You know, when that's not

the case but that's just where our minds go. So,

Celebrate the good things and but be aware of the basics that people expect and really think about how you communicate that as well so that you're not delivering the wrong message unintentionally. Right. And I mean that goes back to reinventing government and talking about the importance of making sure you're delivering services well, as as if these customers were a a a client, which they are, but sometimes in local government we don't think that way, and so treating them as if

Okay,

if we were a corporation and we needed to keep these people on as customers, otherwise they'll stop paying us. Right. you know, how do we what do we need to do? What are the the little extra steps we can take to improve that quality of service as they're going around? So I think that's a a great point.

What else did you hear? Okay, following that session we had one more general session on Friday morning and this is a unique one and in South Carolina this is a gubernatorial election year. So we had a session where both the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor were invited to come and do a QA and you know introductory about themselves.

On the Republican side, current Attorney General Alan Wilson was invited but was unable to attend. On the Democratic side, the candidate Jermaine Johnson was here and he was able to share a little bit about his background, his political walk and his platform as a candidate for governor. so that was different. We haven't done that before, but

it will be a reality, a new governor because Henry McMaster is term limited out.

So that was a little different session. It wasn't specific to local government, but it was important for us to to meet and hear from these candidates as much as we could as we are just a few months away from the general election period. But then in the afternoon on Friday, these were all what are called concurrent sessions, and they were largely geared towards specific topics. Some of them were geared towards population size of your community, while others were geared towards just a general

information and one of them I missed and I wish I had gone to now that I've heard so much about it was there was a a session called the fifty thousand dollar Facebook comment and this was a social media expert who really talked about how to use social media and not use social media and how that can affect you as a local government

But one I did attend that was very informative and important was called the Municipality as an employer. And this was led by Fred Williams and he is a human resources attorney who serves a lot of local governments in South Carolina. And he did a presentation on the do's and don'ts of HR as a municipality and he focused a lot on regulatory requirements so

such as the American with Disabilities Act of FMLA and some other potentially discriminatory policies. so he did a a really thorough although in his own words

crammed session, he said he spent forty five minutes on something that he would usually spend three or four hours on. but it did open a door for a lot of of communities to know that, hey, these things are important and they matter and if we don't do them, we are putting not only ourselves but our communities

at risk of being liable for discriminatory practices in human resources. so I encourage you if you are a municipality regardless of size you if you have one employee or a thousand employees you need to pay attention to HR policies and regulations to make sure you are doing things right not only because it's the right thing to do but you want to protect your municipality from a liability point of view as well. Interesting. Did you hear any

Anything in particular that you saw as a a takeaway or maybe you heard some questions that you felt like that's clearly a a new takeaway for that town? I would say there was a lot of focus on the FMLA and the ADA and who it applies to and who it doesn't. Okay. And under the FMLA, I I if I knew this I'd forgotten it. Because we're government, the FMLA applies to us, but

if you don't have more than fifty employees, it's limited. Okay. So you're classified and I'm probably not saying terminology correctly, you're classified as a

an entity that has to pay attention to it, but you don't have to unless you have a certain number of employees. And I didn't realize that distinction. Okay. and I know I did not say that correctly, but you know legally I didn't describe it correctly. But that was new to me. I didn't realize that governments fall into a class, but then they still have to consider the number of employees they have to respond to certain things under the ADA and F ML A. And I'm not an attorney so if that did not make sense

Yeah. So just to paraphrase potentially, because I didn't know this either. But it makes sense that no matter what a government like I think the limit for FMLA is fifty employees in the commercial space, but I'm guessing it's either lower or that you at least have to have an FMLA policy, maybe regardless of size, but maybe if you're under fifty you can choose you can state as a policy, you don't have to or something. But maybe something like that. We're all conjecturing here.

Okay.

and then the rest of the afternoon,

There was a a session that you went to that I'd love to hear what your thoughts on these were shared challenges and solutions, round table discussions by population size. So which one did you attend, Karl? I think you said you attended the three thousand and so I think it three thousand under, three thousand to ten thousand and the ten thousand over, I think. So I attended the under three thousand one. and that was a very crammed room actually. It was a packed house. It was great. lots of towns in there participating.

the executive director Todd Glover kicked off that session as well. One of the things he was mentioning is that and I he actually mentioned this in the opening keynote I forgot, was that there are a lot of small municipalities who aren't keeping up with their books and they're behind on their audits and things like that

apparently there was a recent article about some recent irregularities in finance for some for several small towns in the Charleston paper Post and Courier. that those kind of stories obviously then affect the state legislature's confidence in the ability for municipalities to manage themselves. And so then that has a negative effect on everybody, even if it's just your small town. at the same time, the association understands that small towns don't have the resources.

resources

or have a very hard time especially if employees transition maintaining that so the municipal association is putting together a team just like they have the field service group for general municipal questions have an actual finance services group that's available to all municipalities to help with financial questions but especially around the smaller ones who don't have the the resources to do that kind of thing so that was one thing they talked about in that session

the other thing they talked about was with the new election laws that came out, the main thing for all of those municipalities and for any municipality under 10,000 is that if you have a municipal election commission, you basically have to disband it and have your county do the elections. they cannot do that anymore. So that was the other those are the two big th items that were discussed. at that point they turn it over to questions in the field.

Two questions, the two main things that came up were one, one of the towns talked about the ADA requirements on websites. and at the time we didn't have the dates, so I did look it up afterwards. the original deadline for large municipalities over 50,000 population was this year, with the deadline for small towns being April of next year. They've actually pushed those both off a year, so now large towns have to have the new ADA compliance requirements around.

website in the 2027 and then small towns in 2028 so everybody gets a reprieve for a year and what that is is there are now requirements that you can't have a scanned a PDF right you have to actually have a PDF that's translatable and then again all the other things you've already had to have like your alt tags in place for your pictures all those kind of things so that screen readers people with disabilities can get the information they need to need to from your site. So they've tightened up those restrictions. Those are the

kind of the two big ones, but there are a ton of other little things that you have to put into place on your website to make it as easy to use for people with especially visual disabilities as possible that help those screen readers navigate through your site

and then there were a lot of discussion around FOIA. Just, you know, everybody's feeling the the pressure of getting more and more requests, especially if you're a small town with probably one administrative employee, maybe two to three. what do you do with a FOIA request? And whether FOIA request is

valid or whether it's just being abusive, all of these things are things that, were questions around and that were being fielded. unfortunately there aren't in many good answers. you still do have to try your best to fulfill them. you can of course charge them for it, a reasonable charge. and you can, push back on things that aren't FOIAble, which of course is things around, employee private information and

information around an economic development initiative that's still in progress. discussion around an employee termination or things like that. All those things that are normally protected are still protected. and so you can push back on those things. But yeah, just the volume that people are getting because of AI, the ability for people to - keep throwing these things in is getting difficult for people to track and respond to in an effective way.

I wanna go back to y where you were talking about the websites and ADA compliance. Yeah. for municipalities that maybe do not have an IT staff or a webmaster, what are some things they can do to make sure they're in compliance but then ha are there

firms or consultants who audit for you so that you don't get in trouble. because I know I've received emails from an individual right who said your site is not yeah compliant because of XYZ. Yeah. Well how can you head that off before you receive a complaint? So there's so yes, you need to have your site evaluated. if you're using a commercial company that

is providing your website design and hosting ideally that's their responsibility and they should just do it for you or you need to talk with them to figure out if it's compliant.

And that includes, you know, in South Carolina here, of course they're the the major companies, but I think that also includes, you there are a bunch of small towns that use the state website, sc.gov, as their hosting. I would expect that if you're using that your mytown.sc.gov

they were going to take care of you for that compliance standpoint. And I think whoever your vendor is, if they're doing your entire website design and hosting and managing you know what they call their content management system, their CMS, if that is all being provided by that single vendor, I think that single vendor should be making those changes for you and then telling you how to keep those things up. if you if you don't have that, then frankly this is an excellent c use case for AI. This is an excellent place where you can point

your AI chatbot of reference say hey I understand that there are you know new ADA rules for local government please scan my website and tell me where I'm non compliant and at the very least and give you a list

So if you're tech savvy enough, you can certainly make the adjustments yourself. If you're not, then at least you then have a list of what needs to be changed. maybe see if another local government, maybe even your county, can make those changes for you. or if not, yes, you're gonna have to get with some provider who can help you figure out how to get in there and make the changes. Okay. anything else that you pulled from the card that small

Yeah, no, that was that was everything it it went by very quickly. All right. Well rolling into today, Saturday, we did have more concurrent sessions and I attended one this morning that was do forms of government really matter? And in South Carolina we have three forms of government that are defined by the legislature for municipalities. And one is the council manager form of government, one is the council form of government, and one is the council --

mayor form of government. So there was one representative from each of those categories. I'll start with our own first mayor Merchant from Sumter. we are a council manager form of government and actually the very first one to adopt that in the United States back in nineteen twelve. And then the council

Mayor form of government was represented by Mayor Nelson of Manning and then the council form of government was Mayor Emmons of Elgin. And they were all similar in some ways that you know ultimately council has responsibility for policy and and vision casting. But the difference is who is implementing the day to day functions of government and each one of those did a great

Example of saying what that looks like from their point of view as a mayor. you know, do they get involved in the weeds or do they hand it off to the professional staff? And under the council manager form of government, the city manager is the employee of the council and they are responsible for the day-to-day implementation of the policy that council and mayor pass. But each one of those forms of government has a different response to

some situations such as citizen complaints. you know in in the case of a manager form of government, the mayor may receive a complaint and and they listen and you know try to be empathetic in the response. But the actually digging in and understanding what happened, they communicate that to the staff or the city manager in this case. And that's where the work is done as far as figuring out exactly what happened. Sure. Hiring and firing

the council form of government

they actually the council and mayor sits down and interviews people and hires them. And she said fortunately she's only had to dismiss one. But that's a totally different aspect. in one case the staff manager is supposed to do the hiring and firing. The other the elected officials do the hiring and firing. So it's very informative session and

because I'm used to working under council manager form of government it was interesting and educational to me to hear the other two perspectives. And generally speaking the larger cities have the council manager form of government as opposed to the council or council mayor form of government. That's not universal but that's generally how it breaks out. So Yes, with the with the exception of Charleston I think. they still have a council strong mayor.

Strong mayor slash council mayor form of government. normally that's the council mayor or the council governments are for the smaller ones, especially if you're in a town below five thousand where you're talking about less than ten staff, your council is effectively act acting both as a legislative body and then as well as department heads. They have realms of responsibilities within that. And shot out and I'll include it in the show notes, the municipal association just did a podcast with

their two staff attorneys on that it was very good and very informative so we'll link to that for for more details. And they just published a new handout. I certainly encourage any municipality to then make sure you describe your form of government somewhere, you know ideally with your council page on your site and potentially in the FAQs about what can who can do what, what they can do.

because most people think of every place as a strong mayor. They think about, Metropolis from Superman or or Gotham, and they think there's a mayor who's just in charge. so having that understanding and sharing that so people understand what

your members of council, what those elected officials can and cannot do, I think is important. Yes. And some commonalities that they all shared regardless of their legally adopted form of government is the importance of having trust with your citizens and communicating with your citizens. And if you don't communicate well you lose trust. Yes. So that was common regardless of city size or city form. Yeah. across all three of those mayors who are with us today. Great. so

And then we followed up today with an awards luncheon where several categories of different awards were given out to different communities and including one particular city. did receive the economic development award for the development of the Philip L. Edwards Clay Court Complex at the Palmetto Tennis Center, and that is a German red clay that

is similar to the surface they play on at the French Open and it's one of the few outside of Europe.

So we're proud of it and happy for the staff to be recognized. And the mentions of German Red Clay still give me twinges from its implementation. because it was quite an ordeal. But it is a fantastic looking court and yeah, love to try playing at it at some point with my very, very poor tennis skills. And it's also, you know, maybe for a future topic, an example of a good public private partnership because we did have some good private partners as well as, you know, our own

staff and and budget as well as state dollars. So an excellent opportunity to look for public private partnerships to make some of these things happen. Absolutely, yeah. I'm writing that right down right now as a future topic for us because we certainly should talk about that and some of the things that you know Sumter has done that even a much smaller municipality can leverage. Yes and

And Goose Creek also received an award today for their accessibility facilities and programs. And in it they mentioned they didn't use the term public private partnership, but they talked about other agencies and organizations that partnered with them in volunteer capacities as well as dollars to make things happen. So it is a great way to tap into some otherwise unreachable resources. Great, great. Any the other takeaway 's

from the conference as a whole? well I think just generally speaking if if you are a municipality w whatever state you're in whether it's South Carolina or otherwise if you haven't connected with your municipal association with whatever it's called and they're called different things depending on the state I encourage you to get involved in that because there are good resources they offer. The staff from the association is a good sounding board to point you in the right direction to ask questions.

I know in the case of South Carolina, if your community doesn't have its own general counsel, you can reach out to your municipal association to ask questions and get some guidance. So there's a way to tap in to resources that maybe you don't have access to otherwise and I encourage you to be a part of that. Yeah, I they are by definition membership organizations. I would think every at least everyone I know of is, so I would assume they all are, which means they're beholden to you. So certainly take advantage of

that as a member in your state whatever things they offer and if they don't offer some of the things we mentioned then go talk to them about what it takes to start doing that because I'm sure you're not the only municipality that needs it.

Karl (28:06)
So just as a note, I'm recording this separately from Mark after our live session. We did have two grants we wanted to share with y'all this episode. first of all, August 3rd, the HUD Pathways to Remove Obstacles to Housing Program is due. And that is a five million dollar to ten million dollar grant to decrease the cost and increase the supply of affordable housing, especially in opportunity zones, which there are several in the Carolinas.

So definitely encourage you to take a look at that. And then due August 15th is the Leary Firefighters Foundation grant from and that's from 5,000 to $25,000 for fire department training and equipment. So with that, back to our wrap-up.

Karl McCollester (28:47)
well great Mark any other thoughts for today? No just this has been a good meeting and I'm glad I was able to attend and look forward to next year. Great thanks Mark

appreciate you hanging around for the little past the end of the conference. And yep, and look forward to talking with you next time. Sounds good. Thanks, Karl