Trusting Steve Howard's toolbox

Happy Monday! Let’s start the week talking about Steve Howard.

Here’s what I like about Steve:

That dude is focused.

As Citrus County Administrator for a little over a year, Steve has fended off more public daggers than his predecessors.

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Yet, he swats them away like skeeters on a summer evening. Just another day. Just some more criticism. It’s OK. Got a job to do.

And it’s a massive job. Like my favorite Elf would say, it’s ginormous.

Never since, well, since we’ve had administrators has the job of administrator been so important. You know what happens when the public yells at commissioners about growth, traffic, roads, and the Inverness Villages 4 quagmire? Commissioners turn to Steve and his staff and tell them to fix it.

Following the late Randy Oliver’s tenure, commissioners knew they wanted a forward-thinking administrator to guide them through the maze of “strategic planning,” a buzz phrase that looks great on paper but is a little hard to visualize in real life.

Steve was a dark horse, coming to Citrus County from Camden County, Georgia, just across the state line on the East Coast. How he picked up strategic planning there is anyone’s guess, but Steve arrived in Citrus County ready to take us where we hadn’t gone before:

Planning. Organization. Logical order of things.

And a focus that finds success not on what he does for commissioners but what he DOESN’T do: He doesn’t play favorites.

When we first met, he made a remark to the effect that he works for five commissioners, and not three. The message is clear: He won’t try to shove through initiatives simply because they have majority board support. That’s not success in Steve Howard’s book.

In fact, he doesn’t seem to care about the inner workings of Citrus County politics at all.

Here’s what I mean.

Steve came with a price tag. His contract was $197,500 — $27,000 more than what Randy Oliver was making when he retired.

Well, OK, commissioners were high on Steve and agreed to the salary. Then, a year later, the board bumped it — at his request — to $215,670. That’s a pretty good boost after one year on the job.

I’m not one to quibble about someone’s salary. Who am I to say whether an administrator makes too much, or too little? It’s a decent salary for this neck of the woods, for sure, but we’re also asking him to do what his predecessors were never tasked: Guide us through an ungodly growth bottleneck.

Politically, though, this seemed like an unforced error. The administrator's on the job only a year, not really enough time yet to get out of the gate, and already we’re giving him a salary boost?

While commissioners were somewhat inconsistent in their answer to that, Steve didn't mess around when I brought up the subject at a Cattle Dog chat recently.

It’s really simple: That’s the market for administrators. Next question?

Doesn’t mean he’s going to bolt if Citrus County shorts him a buck or two. It means he wants to get paid for the value of the job.

To me, that shows focus. He is glued to Citrus County, singing the praises of what’s to come, speaking to community organizations, and getting out in front of what strategic planning really means.

My friend Veronica Kampschroer and I debate this all the time. She sings about the value of strategic planning. Me, it’s just words on paper without specific action that's easily explainable to the public.

Like now.

The county’s website has a new “Strategic Planning Dashboard” with easy-to-understand updates on all the major county projects. Some we see — C.R. 491 widening — and some we don’t — conducting a space-needs analysis. Take a look at this thing and tell me you don’t come away with a much better grasp of where we are.

The data is a little raw at the moment, and I’m sure the dashboard will spruce up to look less government-ish. But it’s a start, a good start.

Getting where we want to go requires planning, communication, and execution — tools we have sorely lacked.

Steve Howard brought his toolbox. Let’s watch him nail it.

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