Whether you are an emerging professional interested in making an impact in your community or someone who wishes to engage the questions and be a better steward for local government today, this is a podcast to satisfy appetites for deeper understanding of what it takes to manage in this challenging environment today. If you would like to get weekly updates from conversations inside the Pioneering Change Community, sign up HERE.
“I need help.”There are conversations in local government that change how you think about leadership. This is one of them. In this episode of PCC Local Time, I sit down with Chief David Lash of Northern York County Regional Police and Chief Dave Steffen, retired chief of Northern Lancaster County Regional Police, to talk about...
Two municipal managers introduced host Nancy to the same book: Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. Chris Garges and Joe Hogarth (also Chief of Police) join her to unpack what a four-star Manhattan restaurant can teach local government. Through a municipal lens, they talk about the front of the house and the back of the house,...
Why would anyone choose to evade governance, and what do contemporary versions of that choice look like in the communities we serve? What familial stories do we carry forward that are, at root, an attempt to evade government? The late James C. Scott, Yale political scientist, agrarian studies scholar, and, as he put it himself,...
Who gets to decide the value of a place? In other words, who gets to decide the metric? I brought that question to Christa Breum Amhøj, a Danish practitioner, researcher, and what I can only describe as a social architect because she reads a place the way a building architect reads a site. And to...
Brandon Ford rejoins Dave Pribulka and Eden Ratliff and wastes no time stepping back into the role of host. He deftly guides the conversation from how have expectations changed for managers to something much deeper that touches on what it means to be apolitical in this new reality and how compartmentalization may or may not...
Economic development isn’t just about buildings and business, sidewalks and parking, blighted malls and dying downtowns, housing shortages and shrinking workforces, casino controversies and data center ordinances. It’s actually about facilitating conversations with the people invested in the outcomes. Keri (Miller) Kenepp, Director of Community and Economic Development for College Township, Pennsylvania, and Erin (Genest)...
Structural change in local government is rare. Therefore, we don’t often get the opportunity to learn how it works. My three guests today, Jerry Andree, Toby Cordek, and Michael Foreman were invited to work with a group of engaged citizens in Millcreek Township, Erie County to shepard a community making its third attempt in fifteen...
Maggie Dobbs is a trained city planner (Rutgers) who spent a decade writing comprehensive plans across Montgomery County before stepping into her current role as Borough Manager of Narberth, Pennsylvania, a half-square-mile community tucked inside Lower Merion Township just outside of Philadelphia. She arrived after a period of leadership turnover. What she found was not...
There is a polite fiction in local government that serving “at the pleasure of the governing body” rests securely on mutual trust. Often it does. Increasingly, it can feel more fragile. In today’s political climate, the employment relationship between elected officials and their chief administrative officer deserves a closer examination. What protections actually exist? Who...
Eden and Dave are joined by guest Jeffrey Stonehill, Borough Manager of Chambersburg Pennsylvania. They begin with an examination of how crises today differ from those Jeffrey encountered when he began in the field. Although they traverse the doom and gloom of dealing with crisis in the profession, they return to the core reasons they...