Let’s talk

Riff Raff, by Michael Tilley
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A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
— James Madison

“Cool Hand Luke,” a compelling movie that unflinchingly captures relationships between the powerful and powerless, includes a classic line that best segues us into a discussion about interaction between the city of Fort Smith and its citizens.

You know the line.

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate,” Captain (William Strother) says as a dirty and bloodied Luke (Paul Newman) is returned to the chain gain.

Failure is a bit much, but there are several instances in the past few years in which a clear communication disconnect between city and citizens has resulted in unnecessary drama and sowing the seeds of future discontent and distrust.

The most recent, of course, is the planned implementation of a 1% prepared food tax to provide funds for the Fort Smith Convention Center and related tourism marketing. The entirety of the discussion about the tax, the convention center and city tourism has devolved into various debates that range from disconnected to disingenuous to disturbing to dysfunctional. Reasoned debate on the matter has become more rare than sightings of the Ivory-billed woodpecker. To be sure, the city has all but lost the public relations battle on this issue.

We are capable of great communication, and often display the ability in dealing with external forces/issues. To wit, keeping the 188th Fighter Wing in Fort Smith, recruiting the U.S. Marshals Museum and landing Mitsubishi’s $200 million wind-turbine assembly.

We suck out loud at internal communication. Collectively, we’re the folks who are more comfortable at a party with strangers than at a family reunion. What we’ve got here is not necessarily a failure to communicate. Instead, it’s more of a decades-long inability or unwillingness to establish a consistent, credible and constructive feedback loop between city leadership and citizens.

There is plenty of literature available on the need for local governments to better communicate and the various communication methods available. In broad terms, the Public Relations Society of America provides a great framework from which we may mutually understand the goal of effective communication/public relations.

“Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other,” notes the PRSA. “Public relations helps our complex, pluralistic society to reach decisions and function more effectively by contributing to mutual understanding among groups and institutions. It serves to bring private and public policies into harmony.”

Harmony may be a bit much, but more harmonious would be nice.

A research report (PDF) from the Institute for Public Relations (from which the Madison quote was pulled) makes this note about the role of governments at all levels: “They have the obligation to keep publics informed, increase awareness of public policies and how they were created, facilitate feedback and two-way communication with publics, and use that information to improve agency performance and accountability (Avery et al. 1995; Garnett, 1997).”

The same report identifies five ways governments should be transparent with citizens.
• Government officials need to make publicly available all releasable information, whether it sheds a positive or negative light on the organization.

• Government officials need to communicate with their publics through the mass media and other channels to reach publics.

• Rather than continue to rely on a small group of politically active organizations and individuals for partial and biased feedback, government communicators need to develop better channels to gather perspectives and feedback from all of its constituent groups.

• Senior public officials should legitimately employ public resources and communication channels for the purpose of policy making, without bias toward electoral politics.

• The implementation of the public communication approach needs to be the responsibility of top administrators who hold communicators responsible for the implementation of the agency’s communications policy.

Previous and present city leaders have said Fort Smith can’t afford a public relations department, or is small enough of a city for regular communications (media reports, board meetings, study sessions, etc.) to inform the citizenry. However, a report (PDF) from USAID addresses such reticence, suggesting (in my interpretation) that avoidance of a professional public relations effort and reliance on community “word of mouth” is a recipe for poor communication.

“Word of mouth does not always reach the expected results because the information may; Be inaccurate, Be incomplete, Promote rumors in a community, Distort the facts.”

Sound familiar? (By the way, the USAID report cited was a guide for establishing governmental communication in the ethnically fractured region of Armenia. Unfortunately, the report has numerous similarities to this area.)

Fortunately, the city is beginning to take small steps toward what could be a public relations effort that creates equal lines of communication between city and citizens.

Tracy Winchell, communications manager for the city, has proposed four basics to get the ball rolling.
• Project Dashboard — This “tool” will remind city leadership and citizens gathered at monthly board meetings of the “top 5 special projects identified by the mayor and board of directors as top priorities.” The priorities are: riverfront development; Interstate 49; Ben Geren Park improvements; fire station improvements; and, wet weather sanitary sewer work.

• Monthly E-newsletter — The e-mail is scheduled to first hit inboxes in mid- to late-July.

• Talking Points papers for specific issues — One of the first examples of this is the talking points for fire station improvements (PDF).

• Social media — As part of this effort, the city has launched two Facebook pages, Fort Smith Insight and the City of Fort Smith Facebook page. Winchell notes: “The city’s organized launch into social media is in the very early stages. However, a number of departments and individuals within the city have personally embraced social media, and it will be important for these individuals to freely share information from these pages.”

Certainly, there are roughly 20% of the citizens who do not care nor intend to be part of a productive engagement with the city or their fellow citizens. As noted before in this space, there is a small group among us who possess a puritanical belief that local and other forms of government are immensely wasteful, if not abusive and corrupt, and only the private sector may address our weaknesses and maximize our strengths. These folks not only stoke conflict within a community, but they use it — especially in a city with a leadership vacuum — to promote their status quo agenda in which Fort Smith remains small, simple, straight and white.

The Captain in “Cool Hand Luke” knew of this crowd: “Some men you just can’t reach.”

But there is, I submit, a much larger group of citizens who would likely appreciate and/or desire to be part of a reasoned and rational debate about the future socio-economic development and governance of Arkansas’ second largest city.

And I further submit that our present discourse would be more productive if decades ago the city implemented and maintained a consistent, credible and constructive public relations effort.

We are smart folks. We can do this. It will take a disciplined commitment among city leadership in terms of finances and philosophy to create an effective public relations effort. It would seem, however, a small price to pay if it helps our collective debates and disagreements more effectively avoid destructive cycles of verbal conflict and more quickly reach collaboration and compromise.