InTouch - New Year, New Changes!
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Happy New Year, everyone.
I hope you’ve had a wonderful holiday season. As much as I enjoy that time of year, I also love the clean-slate feeling you get when turning the calendar.
Much will be new about this year besides changing the date.
We will soon have a new president and administration in Washington. Until the transition takes place, we won’t know what that will mean in terms of actual new policies. With the presidency and majorities in Congress under one party, the federal government may attempt to make sweeping changes very quickly. Changes could affect us in any number of ways at the local level. At this point, about all we can say is we’ll be watching developments carefully.
Closer to home, we have a new supervisor. We welcome Kristin Gaspar to our County family and look forward to working with her as our new District 3 supervisor. She was the first elected mayor of the City of Encinitas, where she was also on the city council. She has served on the Encinitas Educational Foundation and is a former president of the Encinitas Rotary Club. She has three young children and previously worked as the chief financial officer of Gaspar Physical Therapy.
Besides what she brings to her new job personally, her arrival is noteworthy for a couple reasons.
One is that this marks the start of regular change on our board. In two years, we’ll have two more new supervisors, as the term limits voters approved a few years back begin to affect our board seats. Then two years after that, two more board members will be termed out so we’ll see another two new faces. By the time Supervisor Gaspar finishes her first term, she will be the senior member of the Board of Supervisors!
We’ve been enjoying a run of nearly a quarter century of stability on our board. As an organization, we’ve gotten to know their expectations, and they’ve gotten to know how we operate. We have developed trusting relationships and understand how to work collectively to achieve common goals. Now the age of turnover is dawning, and the new era will take a little adjustment. We must push to solidify this Board’s legacy by carrying out their final term initiatives while also preparing for continuous shifts in future policy and priorities due to term-limit turnover.
A built-in state of flux has been a fact of life for many governments, and now it is for us as well. We’ll adapt.
Another major change Supervisor Gaspar represents is generational. She’s barely beyond the cutoff for classification as a millennial! Her colleagues on the board – like myself – are boomers. And we all know there is a big difference in the way different generations think and act. I’m certain exciting policy and procedural discussions are ahead.
It’s not just generational change on the Board of Supervisors you need to consider. Generational transition is happening throughout the County. It wasn’t long ago that we were talking about the coming millennial generation. Well, they’re here. A full third of our County workforce is now millennials. And, over the next decade, millennials will account for approximately 50 percent of our employee population. Don’t be fooled by stereotypical jokes about millennials. In fact, millennials are, hard-working, committed public servants, whose contributions in the workplace are growing. They are already stepping into leadership roles across our organization.
Government will probably never have the employee churn of private industry, but we’re also not as static as you may think. Nearly 32 percent of our employees have been with the County four years or less. That’s a lot of fresh members in our ranks, all needing to learn the ropes and understand what it means to work for the County. At the same time, they bring new ideas, curiosity and enthusiasm to what we do.
So, yes, of course, we’ve always had change. Now we’re going to experience even more of it. It’s important to realize that and be prepared. Get limbered up mentally, because we’ll likely need to be more flexible than we’ve ever been.
With that, get ready – change is exciting. Let’s go 2017!
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