How To Handle Bureaucracy in Local Government: City Staffers Explain

In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck is joined by Carlee Alm-LaBar and Kevin Blanchard, former city staff members in Lafayette, Louisiana. Carlee is now Strong Towns’ chief of staff, while Kevin is CEO of the nonprofit Downtown Lafayette, which promotes infrastructure development and business revitalization.

Carlee and Kevin discuss the challenges of balancing competing demands and priorities when working in local government, particularly when trying to make smarter financial decisions. They also share recommendations for how local governments and residents can work together constructively.

• Click here for a computer-generated transcript.

  Chuck Marohn 0:00

  Hey everybody this Chuck Marohn, welcome back to the strong towns podcast. We've been talking the last few weeks about budgets and finance decoder and city politics as it relates to we're going broke. No, we're not. I wanted to get two insiders on the show, people that I have spent time with in City Hall trying to decipher budgets and figure out what was going on. Carlee Alm-LaBar

  you might know as our chief of staff here at strong town. She had a long history of doing many, many, many things, but including time in city hall in lafat, Louisiana, her partner in crime, I think, is the best way to describe it, or her, her close colleague, who, every time I met with Carlee, was in the room as well as Kevin Blanchard. Kevin held many, many different positions inside City Hall. He's been on the podcast before, but now he's back. Kevin, welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast.

  Kevin Blanchard 1:05

  Thanks, man. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Carly, nice

  Chuck Marohn 1:09

  to you know, you and I spent three days together this week, but it's nice to have you on to talk.

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 1:14

  So yeah, I'm excited too. Let's, let's start

  Chuck Marohn 1:18

  this way. You. You both were in senior roles in the city of Lafayette, Louisiana. And I think by way of telling people like, what those roles were, I think the interesting thing to me is, what were your expectations coming in? And then what were the things that you kind of immediately figured out once you got into place? And maybe Kevin, I think maybe we'll start with you. I know your background. You're an attorney, and you were working as a journalist when you got brought into City Hall. Is that right? Yeah.

  Kevin Blanchard 1:47

  So I started my career as a journalist covering local government, and so the mayor that Carly and I both ended up working for at the same time was kind of the guy I was covering. And so you know, you kind of see the issue from the outside, certainly trying to stay objective about everything, but getting actually into City Hall and getting the phone calls and having to deal with the council folks and putting the budget together and everything else, makes everything a lot more real, because you realize just the sheer number of trade offs and kind of just the general triage nature of the entire thing, right? I used to joke in the different contexts when I was newspaper reporter, and people would be like, oh, you know, it's just a conspiracy to like, you know, do whatever. And I'd be like, You have no idea how close we come not to being able to get the newspaper out every day like we lack. We lack the ability to pull off any kind of conspiracy, right? And it's kind of like that. That was my experience, at least in the local government, a lot of folks trying to do the right thing, but just up against it, just pretty much at every turn.

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 2:59

  Carly, I would say the same thing. So my experience inside City Hall was a little bit circuit wandering, I guess is a better word. So I was really brought in more on the communication side inside the mayor's office, and then slowly inherited more and more planning and development responsibilities, and just as I got deeper and deeper into it, realizing time and time again, as Kevin said, how many good people there were, but so many conflicting motivations and directions that that really made performing the government, performing at a high level really challenging Sometimes, and so, you know, trying to interpret, you know, really good people trying to interpret a lot of different directions, and really trying to make the best for everyone, which wasn't always the best for the person they were working with, or, you know, trying to support. So it was just, you know, every day was an adventure, working inside city government with a lot of a lot of competing demands and challenges. And

  Chuck Marohn 4:07

  I can I dig into that, because you both said this, and I feel like, obviously, there's elected officials, there's the general public, there's other staff members, there's rules and regulations you have to follow. You both have said, like, there's a, you know, we're trying to make good decisions, but there's all these things. I think people outside would say, well, that's politics. Like, that's what, you know, that's, that's where you're all compromised. How would you describe that push and pull? Like, what are some examples of where those things run into each other. Carly, maybe you can, you can start with that one. Then we'll go to Kevin.

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 4:44

  Oh gosh, it is. It is. I mean, you know, so for a couple of years that I was in government, the last couple years, I was the planning director, and I think that's where you see a lot of tensions, is, you know, you have things like right now. At strong towns, we talk a lot about the need for housing and the need for cities to take the lead in housing. Well, you know, that's, I can't tell you how many planning meetings I was in where, like, public meetings, where there was a housing development or the opportunity to build more housing, and someone always thinks that that snuck up out of nowhere. So you have, you have one person in your community who's trying to do what they see as a great development project, a great housing opportunity. It comports with things that you've written in the comprehensive plan, and it just generally is on the, you know, on the outside, an objectively good thing for the community, but the person two doors down, didn't know about it, hasn't had their traffic problem addressed, their garbage problem addressed, whatever their problem is that local government has has either ignored or or kind of put off to the side or de prioritized, and all of a sudden you find yourself in a contentious public meeting where that person is like, How could you even entertain the idea of, of allowing this housing when I, you know, you can't even do the basic function of government that that I've been asking for for five years. That would be a great that'd be a great example that I probably saw almost every month, really, when, when I was in planning seat,

  Chuck Marohn 6:17

  you kind of have to acknowledge that we aren't doing the base right? Like, that's, that's not an illegitimate statement, right? Yeah.

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 6:25

  And then there's, there's also, there's, there are times when people, what people, what those people expect from local government, isn't always reasonable, too. So they sure, you know, they're like, I want the traffic light outside my house. And you're like, actually, there's 700 good reasons that that's not a good idea, so we haven't given it to you. But then that person you know hasn't bothered to learn things about what are the what are the negative consequences of putting a traffic light outside their house? So to them, that's just a local government failure, and they're not willing to see it any other way. That's what they've been asking their local government for. Their local government hasn't provided it, and so they don't think the local government can do anything, right? And so you're just, you're just constantly in this balancing act of of motivations and expectations. That is, that is, you know, it's really rewarding work, but it is everyday challenging, too. Kevin,

  Kevin Blanchard 7:25

  yeah, you know, I tell people when there's a potential, you know, outbreak of a affordable housing project somewhere, and you get all the, you know, folks scrambling to, you know, fight it, get organized against it, which doesn't happen a lot in Lafayette compared to a lot of other cities, only because we're just not building a lot of housing period, right? So like that one time every few years it happens. And I just feel bad for everybody concerned, because, you know, we have a problem like anyone else. We need to be building places that people can afford to live, but the types of products that we are saying, like, this is the off the rack. This is what you get. This is what will prove. This is what you know. This is the degree skids sort of thing. I wouldn't want that next to me either, you know, where I lived. And so the the you see, these kinds of, you know, systematic issues where everybody kind of puts their hat on in the morning and they say, it's my job to do this right? And I just feel like we've gotten to the point where those things are so cross purposes, depending on, like, what your point of view is, and and nobody gets the product they want in the end anyway. So yeah, I think Carly hit the nail on the head, like we we don't do a good job sort of with our own motivations and understanding why as local government we do the things we are doing. And you know, it is just kind of a playbook that's been handed to us 2030, years ago. And nobody gets incentivized in a local government to go stick their necks out and do something different, right? And so I'll give you an example. We, we did the whole, I don't know, 1012, years ago now, did a revision of our development code, and, you know, based it a lot on, you know, we've got to provide housing choice, and at least, you know, find different ways to incentivize infill, as opposed to where we're building out here we're all flat in southern Louisiana, it's cane fields and crawfish ponds. And so it's not we don't have anywhere for the water to go. It just has to wait, right? And the cheapest land is all out in the old crawfish ponds. And so, you know, we've told people, this is the system. You're going to buy a house here. It's the most affordable thing you can get in our market. You're going to have to drive 30 minutes to get to your job. But, you know, this is what you do. And you go get your loan, and you buy your house, and in 2016 2015 I always forget the year 20. 15 we just had a massive flood that just, you know, destroyed 1000s of homes. And so many people were like, What the hell? You know? Yeah, you told this is how this was gonna work, you know. And here it is, like, this all seemed like a really bad idea, and we all are shocked and outraged, and, you know, we're gonna do something about the drainage now, but you know, bit by bit we forget, well, that code that we put in place was supposed to make infill easier. So we had a project about a year, two years ago, in a in a neighborhood off of our downtown, where we're trying to, you know, remove barriers for people, and we had snuck a thing into our code. I use that term like loosely. We just put a provision that said, Hey, we're going to relax a lot of these different types of development standards. We're not going to make you pave your parking. We're not going to make you put the six foot site proof fence all the other crap. We're not going to make you do that if your neighborhood meets any one of these seven requirements, right? And it's things like on your street. Are there other types of uses already, right? Is, is there a is there an office next to your house? Right? Also, yeah. And it was really seven descriptors of the neighborhoods that we want to be encouraging infill in. And we found out two years ago that the the city, oh, good, good people trying to do their job, had decided to interpret that list not as a Do you meet any one of these seven tests? No, no, all of these seven tests. And so they were routinely denying people and making folks in like these neighborhoods to the much higher standard that we had all agreed to, that the council had agreed to. It all said, No, that's the thing. And when I, you know, grabbed them by the neck and shook them and said, Why are we doing it like this? They were like, well, I mean, you'd basically be, what do, whatever you want if in that neighborhood, if we did it like that. And we're like, yes, that was the point. But we we try to have this, like, one size fits all. Everybody's got to go in the cookie cutter and and then we're shocked and amazed when, you know, folks are like, you're killing us. You know, this isn't, you know, these neighborhoods have been hearing for 10 years now that infill is important and that they're important, but they don't see any action. They don't see anything getting built, and they're, you know, frankly, tired of the committees. There's

  Chuck Marohn 12:21

  a tension there. And it's, it's interesting because you just laid out this car, let's say, carve out in the in the code that would allow things I could see how you did this, because going through, I remember when you guys brought me in to debate in woke air, quote there Randall O'Toole, and that was just like crazy town, and all you were trying to do is, like, adopt a plan that was not even enforceable at the end of the day. It was just like a guideline for what you were going to do. Okay, I see how you get to let's, let's do this carve out so we don't have to redo the entire code and all this. Let's just focus on, like, the high yielding places, yet the bureaucracy internal to City Hall molds and adapts to, in a sense, resist that. I'm going to give it a word fear. I don't know what it is like. I want you to describe it. I'll start with you. Kevin, what is it in city hall that makes us as staff people, and I've served in these capacities too, so I get it. I'm going to say, like, fearful, like, risk averse, like, what? Oh my gosh, I'm afraid of this.

  Kevin Blanchard 13:29

  Well, it's sometimes it's a little bit of paternalism, a little bit like, you don't know what you're doing. I've been doing this job for 20 years. Someone's going to complain, right? And it's just a bureaucratic sort of, I'm the boss of this issue, and I understand it more than you do, but I think the the other thing is our local governments are starved, especially in our city level, for resources, for funding. You know, we've gotten to the point now where, you know, there's just a such a giant scarcity mentality that any kind of new thing, any kind of, like, potential, you know, change just is sends up like a red flag of risk. And they're like, this, just can't, if this happens, we don't know what else will happen. And you just got a lot of white knuckling, I think, where folks are like, I don't want to, like, do a thing, you know, because I'm not sure how it's gonna how it's gonna play, but I think it's just frustration and just the the inability to kind of see, see three steps down to where you need to see

  Chuck Marohn 14:31

  Carly, there's a sense, and I'm gonna impose this on you from the outside. Louisiana is a in our in our political dynamic, a very red, deep red state, but not a deep red state in the way that other. It is one of those where you know individual liberty, your ability to do what you want with your property that's very paramount to the identity. Yet time and time again, we ran into using in a. And the levers of government to force the opposite. I feel like there's a question I want about how people react to that within city hall. But then there's this also sense of, like, how do you over how do you ultimately overcome that? How do you deal with that? Gosh,

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 15:16

  I think that is that's like, the question that I I don't know that I ever got, like a really satisfactory answer to that, because that was, I mean, every Planning Commission meeting that I sat in, and every Zoning Commission meeting that I sat in, I would, I would just kind of sit there and bewildered about like I thought that we cared about property rights, I think that people would literally come to the podium and say, You're violating my property rights because of what someone next door was wanted to do with their property Like a really, it was often like an earnest interpretation, and it was an internal conflict, or a conflict that I really never completely resolved, frankly, how to think about because truly that many of the same people who would advocate For private property rights were often very, very, very threatened by someone else wanting to exercise those same property rights. And there was just, you know, not often a good, a good resolution to that. So I don't know if I have, like, the best answer for that. Honestly, it's just this internal contradiction in the way that you experience that in other, you know, in other, in other realms,

  Kevin Blanchard 16:47

  our our old boss, pretty conservative, Republican, very popular mayor, served three terms here, and if we didn't have term limits, probably could have done a fourth, if his wife would have Let him. And he used to say, the pothole doesn't care if you're a Republican or you're a Democrat, right? The pothole is going to bust your suspension one way or the other. And I think that you know the it does kind of once it feels a lot more personal and local and across the street from you or next door. Yeah? Folks, folks like general, like voting booth ideology starts to morph with what they feel is their own personal self interest and financial self interest, you know, and and look, I've developed property in this state, across this state. I can tell you that Lafayette is no better or worse than any other place in our state. I think that our conservative mentality does come out in a lot of really healthy criticism of our government and that we we we've been saying that, like, local government isn't working for like 20 years here, and we've been arguing about it and our system of government and everything else, but there is definitely still a bias towards in that environment, what I believe is good development culturally, right? And so if I've, if I've grown up in a subdivision, you know, outside of the city of Lafayette, I went to high school in a particular type of neighborhood. I live in a particular type of neighborhood, we get sometimes caught in this, like, it's a trap. Like, we're like, you know, they're like, Well, I don't want to live downtown, or I don't want to live in that neighborhood. No, no, we're not. We're not making you live anywhere. You know we're we're not going to make you live in this apartment complex, for sure. And so we've been trying to make the connection for those folks culturally, who are again, supportive people and want to know, like, how they can help. Like, look, we're just, we just need you to understand this. Might you know your your individual issue shouldn't trump what is effectively like our entire city. I mean, we're we're landlocked as a city. We have been all of those smaller towns have annexed all the property around us, and we still have development rules that are geared towards subdivisions. And I look around and I go, I don't even know where those subdivisions are, you know, we we have just, we all patted ourselves in the back, and I'm excited about it too. We're, like, couple years in a row, the fastest growing parish in Louisiana. And, you know, that's something I'm glad that we're doing that, but we have lost population in our city. And so, you know, I look around and I go, that is not sustainable like that is our economic engine. And if we're not being smarter about how to build up and build dents and take these 1000 empty lots that we have just in a mile radius of downtown and put them to use, then we're not going to be left and eventually we're not going to be the fastest growing parish in the state either. You know, there's only so much juice you can squeeze out of this orange, and it's just about dry.

  Chuck Marohn 19:46

  Famous, from a strong town standpoint, is the work that Minicozzi did where I met you guys back in I think it was like 2014 2015 when we started doing that work. I remember at the time when I. Came in that you had a huge backlog of road maintenance that's directly kind of downstream from this whole thing. I wonder, Kevin, if you can walk us through the structural tension or the structural gap behind some of those things, because it was your, your job, in a sense, to fix the road budget.

  Kevin Blanchard 20:20

  Yes, I was public works director here for two, two and a half years, and that was a lot of fun. You know, we had to shut down bridges and close roads and and folks would be so mad, and I'd be like, Look, I have a budget of a million dollars, and I have ten million worth of repairs to do. So we just looked at the traffic counts, and you're gonna have to drive further this morning to get to work, you know. And, you know, we had the same thing. Our old boss had gone out early in his career as mayor and tried to get a tax passed, and he did the thing. He was like, here's the here's the list that we've all been trying to get done, and we finally need to do the loop. And it got stomped. I mean, we are a very, like, conservative place. We don't like taxes, and we, we will complain about traffic, but also just want for, like, the magic Mardi Gras, Ferry to come and, like, give us the road and so he that's, that's what led to this whole, you know, how do we get better choice, better development patterns, stop the sprawl. The issue actually came though locally, like, the very hyper sort of twist in that after you guys left, was we had that giant flood, and we actually had a discussion, a decent discussion. It was in the right direction, at least, of like, well, shoot, we've been spending all these money on, you know, four laning and five laning and doing all this other stuff, and we haven't been building any kind of drainage infrastructure. So, you know, we probably had the pendulum way over here. It probably overcorrected a little bit. We had a little bit of like controversy in our last administration over like, some of those big drainage projects, and whether or not those were effective or good uses of the money. But whether, you know, we've just shifted the what is on the list really like, we've gotten a point now where we're like, oh, well, obviously, you know, we did building more drainage, right? And I don't think that's actually in my mind, at least directionally closer to the place we need to head, right? We are. We are a very low line parish, like the drainage infrastructure, just from a practicality standpoint, is a lot more useful than than the than, you know, finding the the fifth way to get to Youngsville, you know, so it

  Chuck Marohn 22:30

  happens when you're in a swamp, right Carly, as you go through budget season, and as you, you know, try to work these things out with a mayor who, I think, is a really, you know, when you were there was a really smart guy want to make it work, a council that, you know, has to pass the budget. How do you talk about these things? How do you present these big gaps, and ultimately, what gets lost, because there has to be a resolution. I mean, you have to actually pass a budget and make things work, even if you can't fix the problems. What? What is that? What does that feel like? What's that process like? What should people know about the compromises that are made?

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 23:14

  Well, first that there's, frankly, a lot of them, right? Because people, people go into the budget process with their, you know, like any process, with their own set of biases and agendas, and especially because anytime you pass a budget, you're working also with a legislative body who has districts. And, you know, when you talk about infill type development and and utilizing existing infrastructure will, generally speaking, a lot of our cities have legislators who represent where the development can happen. So they they want those roads and they want development because growth is good, and the people in their district will have more access to services and have more access to goods. And so typically, like, once you're inside that budget process, even if you have alignment around, you know the phrase that I used to always say, and I can't remember if it was Joey that shared this with us or someone else, but like, when you're when you're developing, you know, more on the fringes of your community, you're that's typically like, publicly expensive, but privately cheap, meaning harder on the government, publicly harder. You go internal to the city, and you are privately really expensive, publicly cheaper, which is why you know when the market is going the market's going to be out on the fringes. And so then you put that into a budgeting process with motivations of people. You know, certainly you have some people who are thinking of the whole, but then you've got a lot of people thinking of the parts. And so it becomes a lot of a lot of balancing act. And so, you know, from. From my perspective, and at least in Lafayette, you know, Kevin's world of Public Works had a lot more influence over the budget than the planning world. The planning world was always kind of trying to, like scrape or scraps, maybe like a million dollar project in there somewhere, to kind of focus on something in the core of the city, and then watching as Public Works was, you know, putting ten million for this road project or that road project. So, you know, that's that can be about the internal politics in the organization as well. Like, for the the planning department to become, like, working buddies with the Public Works Department, to be like, Okay, how about this? Like, can you put this set of projects on your on your list? Because here's why they're good, and here's what they'll do for the city as a whole. But it's, it is, even when everyone has the best of intentions it, it is an inelegant and messy process of a lot of personalities and politics and so, like, the the thing that I was always trying to do is, like, is kind of have the big messaging that that could help, like, talking points that could help guide the process. Like, here's what we're trying to do. We're not going to achieve it with everything. But like, here's where we're trying to go and creating those kind of North Stars for people to latch on to and kind of defend different parts of the budget with you

  Chuck Marohn 26:25

  and I, Carly, are running an organization of 20 people, right, with 6000 members, yep, doing you know, with a board of directors, and I feel Like every day we have some nuance, complication, personality issue, you know, tangled web of things that we're trying to unravel. Yeah? And you know, we're doing complex things, but it pales in comparison to the things that we ask a local government to do, right? And yet, you and I spend most of our time trying to wrestle these things and figure them out. Break this down for a member of the public, I'm a member of the public. I'm I live in Lafayette, Louisiana. I'm upset because taxes are going up and services are being cut and things seem non responsive to me. What should I do with that energy? Where should I direct it. How do I understand it? If you're advising a member of the public who has those like legitimate concerns, what, how should they process that mentally?

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 27:32

  So the very first thing that I would say is that it is extraordinarily easy to get involved if you're serious about it, and you're constructive in your approach. So if you know, if you don't walk into your first meeting and stand up at the council desk and scream for five minutes about inept government, and instead you come and you say, Hey, my name is Carly, and I really care about our community, and I want to get involved in a productive way, there's a good chance that people are going to engage with you and be happy to have you there. So like, one of the very first things I would say is that cities need engaged citizens who are willing to be constructive and think of problems as complex and interrelated. The second thing that I would say, and I actually shared this in maybe with some of our local conversations or in our cohort meeting, is that like, particularly when you're working with elected officials or even department heads, the things that come at them in a given day are So I mean, you can have to meet with, you know, a victim of crime in your community, and then you're going to the next meeting, and you're meeting with a developer from another state that wants to, that wants to do a great project in your city, and then you're meeting with the police union, and then you're meeting about a drainage Project and the and so I always try to approach working with officials with a lot of empathy and understanding that it can, no matter how talented they are, it can be very difficult for them to focus and so trying to be a constructive partner with them and believing that, I mean unless and until you have reason to believe otherwise, that they are actually working for the best interest of your city, can get you a long way to being a helpful partner and having your priorities elevated and where you think the city should go, those things elevated into the discourse of leadership, particularly, you know, Lafayette parish, which is how our community is governed, is 240,000 people. And you know, when I talk to friends or neighbors or whoever like, I always emphasize like, if you're serious, it's very easy to be involved. I know maybe at a city of a million or 1.5 million, it may be a little harder, but, but you know, Lafayette is not a small community, and. And you can, you can be a helpful part of it.

  Chuck Marohn 30:02

  Yeah, Kevin, I think

  Kevin Blanchard 30:04

  I've gotten to the point in this whole issue where people need to focus on being self reliant at whatever level they think they can do that at. I think the, you know, local government folks are, you know, Carly's just basically describing, like, this reactive kind of triage situation that they're in, and I've seen the most results, and of course, they're small, but I've seen the most results when people in an area or people in a sector get organized and start, you know, self, directing a lot of that energy. I think the other thing is, we need to get to, like other sectors of our community involved in helping shape this stuff, the volume, I guess, has turned up to 11 and so many issues across the country right now, local governments are led by elected officials who are just trying to make people happy, and at this point, none of the buttons they're hitting are working. And so it really is a good opportunity for the folks who own, you know, the businesses downtown and the the neighborhood that's been pretty good at getting organized and having a block party to Carly's point coming in and just being like, look, there's 100 of us. This is what we want to do. We're just mostly telling you at this point, you don't need to worry about us, but you also don't need to fight with us. You have other things to do, and so we've had a lot of, you know, forgiveness rather than permission, sort of moments, and it's unfortunate. It shouldn't be that way. But you know, ultimately, if we want the system to change, we have to start making it respond to us and having folks keep up with what we want to be doing in our neighborhoods and in our communities.

  Chuck Marohn 31:42

  I'm 100% with you. I wonder what that portends for the future of local government. Kevin, because I look okay, love it, Louisiana. I'm gonna say a few things, and you can, you can please disagree. I feel like a well run place, not a bloated City Hall, pretty like, you know, in terms of local governments, certainly on the end of the spectrum that I would say is more like a well run machine than a crazy, you know, hornet's nest of stuff. Now, is it messy? Yeah, as Carly described, you know, the decision making process is opaque and frustrating and all that. But this is not like you're not at the bad end of the spectrum. I feel like if we extrapolate to state government and then we extrapolate to federal government, I don't know how it responds. I don't know how it becomes this well oiled machine that we think it should be. What is your insight on self reliance? What are the implications for how government, local government specifically should run, should be acting. Should do, is it just a matter of like, we need them to do fewer things better? Or is it something is it something else? What

  Kevin Blanchard 32:58

  I've been telling people lately is, or at least one of the things, I think, is the problem is we need to get away from the idea that we need to have a one size fits all rule book, and that's a dangerous thing to put in the hands of a bureaucracy, a well functioning bureaucracy, too. Let's focus more on sort of, what's this block need, and what does this neighborhood need? Let's build our policies around that, and let's empower the people in those places to have more say. We have a really good set of neighborhood groups here in Lafayette, so all the the neighborhoods that surround downtown the city helped organize, 20 years ago, these informal kind of planning committees that don't have a lot of real power, but we've started giving those groups, you know, 510, $1,000 a year to do like a small project in their neighborhood. The end goal there is not that nice entry sign now that is in front of that neighborhood. I'm sure there's a sense of pride in everything else. The important thing is, like those folks organized and like sat around a table and picked a logo and figured out where they're going to put it, and had to go talk to the guy who owns the property there. We need that in spades all over our cities, and getting out of the way and just being like, look, you know, we had a stupid controversy here, I think a few weeks ago, because some folks started putting flags up on the light poles on their street. Right? We had a big median, and there's some light poles, and people put American flags up, and then people put blue lives matter flags up, and then people put pride flags up. And it was like, Oh, what are we going to do? This is a flag war. And look, people were mad and they were upset, and they were on Facebook, and they're like, I don't like that. Those flags are up. And they're like, I don't like this up. I was really hoping that that would have, like, sparked, like the city to come in instead of saying, Okay, we're changing the rules about flags, right? I was really hoping to be like, you get to do what you want with the polls in your neighborhood, like you paid for those things, but we want you to sit down and actually have a conversation and like, plan out, how are you going to do it, and who's going to decide? And, like, how do we make that rotation? We tell people. People, especially in a conservative place like Lafayette, that we don't want a nanny state, and, you know, we want to empower you, but you put power in the hands of a bureaucracy, you're going to be treated that way. That is just, that's the nature of it. And and I agree, we're a conservative city. We have a very, very bare bones laissez faire government. We're not looking to do a lot of stuff or regulate stuff. But that tendency that that you still feel like, ah, the people need me to say something here, or they need me to do something. I would like to get back to where we we were originally, like as a culture, here in Lafayette and South Louisiana, good and bad. But one of the good things was, is we just used to take care of the stuff ourselves, right? There's such a thing as, like, Cajun ingenuity, which is just like, I got a thing. I'm going to push it together this thing. You know, you guys are always talking about incrementally building out a lot and starting with the small house and everything else. When I talk to people about this, I just have to say, like, that's the way your grandparents did it, right? And, and, and some of those. And everybody's like, Oh yeah, that's what you're talking about. And they're like, Well, that won't work in my neighborhood. And you're like, yeah, see. And so there's how, like, the the rub happens, but we've got to get out of people's way, you know, I we pretend like you're going to get a bunch of us, because that's who we are. Local governments just us, right? We Right, right, working our people and like, somehow we put them in that office, and they're going to have all the money they need and all the power they need and all the right rules they need, like they don't, and so they just need to get out of our way too, and like, let's do this together.

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 36:30

  Chuck, I don't know if I can follow that.

  Kevin Blanchard 36:33

  I need some more Diet Coke.

  Chuck Marohn 36:38

  How would you react to that? Carly from inside City Hall, I always look at it as an empowering thing, but I think a lot of people in City Hall look at it as a disempowering thing. To me, this, this idea, and what Kevin, you're describing is subsidiarity, right? Like you've got this flag issue, we can either, you know, we can either have a local government come in and decide which is not a subsidiary approach or B local government come in and say, All right, there's a there's an issue here. Let me facilitate a conversation that would let you decide. And I think that the reaction often in City Hall is that option A is empowering of them, because they get to decide, and Option B is disempowering of them. But I look at it the other way. I look at it like a parent, right? Like I'm as a parent, if I decide everything we just got through a thing of where my youngest is going to go to college, if that's my decision, maybe that's empowering for me in a small way, but if I actually enable her and help her to make this difficult decision, that's like fulfilling for her and for me in so many ways. How do we get City Hall to make that transition? Carly, because I feel like it's really important, at the end of the day, that we do this transition right. I

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 37:53

  can share how I tried to approach it when I was a staff person, and actually goes back to the example that Kevin shared with those seven little check marks, that was, that was like a balancing act of, sort of codifying flexibility and codifying local ownership. And so it's trying to, I don't know that it's the right way to like, what's that called? Like, square, the circle meet in the middle. But you mean,

  Chuck Marohn 38:24

  you mean the code reform where it was or, or, or, or, and they returned

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 38:29

  later, interpreted this again, yes, so it didn't necessarily always get interpreted correctly in the end, but that was actually exactly what we were going for. Was like, okay, yes, for better or worse, we've trained people to look to government for the solution and or that is the current cultural expectation. But like that does not mean that the government then needs to embrace that responsibility as like, Okay, well, let me write the law for every situation, because that's the frustrating thing. And the real thing as a local government staff person is just as soon as you have the rule book written, there's a new situation, right? And so it is trying to be as flexible when you are called upon to draft rules or regulations, trying to understand that situations change, situations are more complex, typically, than they've been brought to you as and like. What can you actually, if you are expected to be the the be the entity that comes in and solves it? How can you do so in a way that like respects the fact that, like, within your own community, like, really, this should be solved at a neighborhood level, like, it should be a solved at a lower level, if you don't have that, if you don't have that mechanism in place, how can you create it within your code or within your regulations? And so that i. Not necessarily saying that that's the right answer, but that is how I approached it as a staff person. Was like trying to create the flexibility if I was expected to fix it through regulation. How can I? How can I draft flexibility in the regulation?

  Chuck Marohn 40:15

  Carly, at the end of the day, what impact does just inertia like this is the way we've always done it have on the ability of people in City Hall to affect change. I feel like we've spent years now describing this brand new experiment that we started on manifesting in the Great Depression and then really implementing after World War Two. I remember as a very young engineer asking questions about why we did this this way or that way. And the answer was, well, that's the way we've always done it, and finding out that well, like we've done it since 1952 that way, but that's not the way that we always did it. How hard is it to overcome inertia in City Hall? And maybe if you have a tip or a trick for how you actually do that, overcome inertia. First

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 41:05

  of all, it's very it is very hard. And recognizing that it's very hard is like one of the first, one of the first things that you can do, I think one of the things that didn't when, when Kevin was speaking earlier about this, that didn't necessarily come out in these terms, is that there are not a lot of rewards for risk taking in government, and change is seen as taking risks. And so there's not you bring forward a policy change. You go to your elected official and say, hey, I want to bring this forward like there's no one that's like, Oh, yay. You're a change agent come like, it's, it's just not it's, it's not culturally from the bottom or the top, generally rewarded, because there's generally someone watching government who's like, oh, here is why I'm afraid of that change. And then you have council members in the middle of, like fights, and they're like, Why did you have to bring this to us? Like, this is and so

  Chuck Marohn 42:05

  have a short better to have a short meeting than a long meeting, right? Exactly, exactly,

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 42:09

  and so and so, the inertia part is, is real and it is hard, and I think it it requires, you know, I worked in government, what I would say now only eight years like and that, that, you know, I'm, I think that there were some things that I was able to do, but at the end of the day, like that wasn't necessarily long enough to, you know, make the systemic change on, on some of these issues. And so I think that the, you know, someone gets trained and has a 30 year career in government and is not a change agent and is not rewarded for change, they're going to do the job in many cases, like the way that they were taught, and that's, that's a that's a risk to kind of, like, new ideas and change the other I mean, the other tactic that I would say to address this is that, I mean, I just also want to say, like, I worked with some really great people who are making careers in City Hall, some of whom I'm still friends with today, and They were willing to change and want to change, and wanted that support to change, and were understood how some of these old systems weren't serving the long term best interests of the community. And so partnering with those people and supporting them as best you can, because they're going to be there after you're gone, and they're going to be able to, you know, facilitate and work on some of the things that that you know were important to you and you think were important to the community.

  Kevin Blanchard 43:52

  I think it doesn't, is it? The Numbers game you have to, you have to, like so many local elected officials, judge an issue on how many emails they got, or how many got. And so one of the tactics that we have used here, I was waiting for Carly to say this, because she says it is, you gotta make whatever the thing is you're doing cool or fun, or, you know, just indispensable. And so we have had success here again, because we do have those neighborhood groups, and we had, like, a little bit of, like an energy source to use, like, that's kind of when we've been able to chip off spots. We spend a little time think about the issue, and then go do a thing, or have a party, or, you know, just invariably try to make it look a little bit less like a controversial thing, as much as it's just a really popular thing, because at the end of the day, they want to know, you know, I think there's like a ratio of like one angry person needs like 10 happy people to balance them out. From an elected official standpoint, we did a we did a project here. We took a little, little road along our river. Were a nicer road. And when we, when we overlaid it, we restriped it from like a three lane road to a two lane road with some bike lanes, right? And in our, in our you know what we didn't do is we didn't ask anybody or anything. We just went in and restriped it. And there was a, it became an election issue, and in the next election, and that neighborhood had generated 80 signatures and had delivered that to the newly elected mayor and said, You have to take these bike lanes off like they're killing our people, you know, they're it's death and destruction. Our property values are going down. They're stealing my TVs, like, you know? And Carly told that Mayor, she was like, he was like, yoke, we're gonna have to do this. And she was like, what if I got you more signatures? So what did, what did our number end up being our calendar? I think it was around 2000 2000 signatures. And we did a bike ride, and we, like, just had fun, and it's a bike ride that exists today, like, and I don't know if the folks who are doing that bike ride know or care that it was like a protest movement 10 years ago, they just knew they looked like fun, and we picked a nice day with nice weather and and so sometimes you just gotta, like, believe in the power of your idea and know that, like, people want this stuff. Then if you give them an opportunity and it's credible, and they think that you can actually pull the thing off, like, they'll sign up.

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 46:20

  I would, I would just add to that too, like people really believe in the future of their community. Like, for Kevin and I, it's Lafayette, but like for someone listening out there, it's your community. Like you're gonna find people who care, and giving them a way to express that passion for the place that they live and love is like, you know, that's the that's, that's the most fun thing you can do, because they're, they're out there, they just haven't had pathways to express that passion for community.

  Chuck Marohn 46:54

  This is kind of a canned question, but I think I want to end with this and go ahead and take it whatever direction you want to go. I You both have been out of city hall for a while now, but you're both actively involved in in the community, and you, you know, Kevin, your your job, I think, brings you to City Hall on occasion. What's the thing that you're most hopeful about? Like, what is it when I look at Lafayette, like, here's the here's the thing that gives me a lot of hope for the future, and what's the thing that you know that kind of keeps you up at night, that like, yeah, you know this is going to come back to bite us. Go ahead. Kevin. You can go first. Go ahead. I am

  Kevin Blanchard 47:34

  very hopeful, because we have been, we've been banging this drum as a community for a while now, and it really does start with like you and Joe and our old boss and and we've, I feel like we've gotten to the point where we've repeated the message enough, and we've had enough retirements and everything else that the the folks, the the decision makers, are starting to be a little bit more like, okay, honestly, I don't think it's that they really love these ideas as much as it seems like the only set of ideas that anybody's offered, right? It just what else you got? And we finally have looked around to the point, and maybe it's a rock bottom moment, but we finally got to the point where folks were like, Okay, we're going to try this thing out, right? So now the city has an infill committee, you know, and they we meet, and the staff meets, and the development community is invited, and we have like, a, you know, our local small developers who come and and it's half sort of like working session, and half like therapy, I guess. And you know, someone can come to the department and say, I really hate what you guys did, and the department would be like, Oh, crap. We thought that was a good project. What happened, right? And we've started those conversations. I think the the thing that keeps me up at night for my city in particular, is that, you know, we still just have such an underlying wealth transfer that is happening from our city into our unincorporated parts of our parish, and it's to the point now where, you know, even though we've been fiddling on the on the margins, and we're just about there, and we're we've just about got it, I do worry that we're too far gone. You know, we we've sort of lost control of our politics, which means we've lost control of our pocketbook. And so I do worry about that. So I know we've got a scrappy group of city folks who are trying to do the right thing, and we've got a very committed group at city hall that does want to do the right thing, but I'd kind of see a tsunami headed this way, and I'm not sure if we've got the lifeboats set up or not.

  Chuck Marohn 49:39

  Carly, I

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 49:41

  would say that the the thing that is the most energizing here is the culture. And so we're, we're a week out from annual event we call festival International, and it's, you know what, 400,000 people, Kevin in our downtown, and artists. Largest

  Kevin Blanchard 50:00

  free international music festival in the country. Yeah. And

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 50:03

  so when you, when you go to that every year, which we all do, and and you feel that energy in the community and and how much of it is based in, like, the roots and history of our community, it's like, pretty infectious. And that's like, that's probably the thing that gives me, of all the things that gives me the most optimism on the challenges side, I think I would, I would agree with Kevin Lafayette, has a really unique form of government that that makes some of these issues challenging, like our literal charter, form of government is, is a is a bit of a challenge that can make particularly, we didn't get too far into it today, but some of the budgetary authority and things like that can be, can be challenging. So that is, that is one of the things that I think does keep both Kevin and I up at night, even though we're also pretty, pretty bullish on things. So you

  Chuck Marohn 50:59

  two are amazing ambassadors for Lafayette, Louisiana. The first time I ever came was during August, and as a Minnesotan, it was like, What did I just agree to do? And just being around you too, and the energy and the love and the passion for the place kept me going when I thought I would melt, and

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 51:24

  we introduced you to our favorite mosquitoes. And called, oh

  Chuck Marohn 51:28

  my gosh. Well, when it rained, you know, here in Minnesota, when it rains, the rain breaks the humidity, and it's beautiful. So this is all rely and so finally it started raining in LA fan. I'm like, oh, thank the Lord. It's gonna finally cool off, and it just became like a sauna, like the rain turned to steam, and it got worse

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 51:50

  than what it is.

  Kevin Blanchard 51:53

  But right now, it is beautiful weather in Latvia. Yeah,

  Carlee Alm-LaBar 51:58

  it's the time of year to be here for sure.

  Chuck Marohn 52:00

  Well, happy festival. I know we're going into Easter, so happy Easter and happy spring. And it's I get to spend all this time with Carly, and it's delightful, Kevin, it's so nice to be able to chat with you again, too, you too. You are both wonderful individually together. It's not double, it's like squared. So I I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everybody for listening and keep doing what you can to build this from town. Take care.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

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• Kevin Blanchard (LinkedIn)

• Chuck Marohn (Substack)

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