Huge Sid Martin tried his finest to inject just a little LOGIC into the best way we do the general public’s enterprise hereabouts.
After 15 years on the Alachua County Fee, Martin — a homespun Hawthorne politician — spent almost as lengthy within the Florida Legislature. And all through, he continued to be annoyed by ongoing city-county feuds, annexation wars and a large town-gown chasm.
So in the course of the Seventies and into the ’80s, Martin ran Leaders Of Authorities In Cooperation (LOGIC). Principally Sid periodically corralled metropolis, county, college and better schooling officers collectively and tried to steer them to return to settlement on lengthy festering factors of battle.
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Martin was a mountain of a person who tried his finest to breach political and jurisdictional boundaries. However when Sid handed on, so did LOGIC.
It will be good to assume that, a long time later, these boundaries have come down. However we nonetheless see far too little logic in the best way our public officers and neighborhood leaders work together with one another.
So it is encouraging to listen to College of Florida Chief Government Workplace Charlie Lane speak about bringing a couple of “strategic alignment” between the town, county, colleges, the enterprise neighborhood, well being care and different essential companions.
“If we’re going to achieve success, we have to take a group effort,” Lane says. “We have got to get smarter about how we sort out a few of the points and methods to maintain these efforts over time.”
Lane has been one thing of a pioneer — possibly even a latter-day Sid Martin — on the logic entrance since he launched a UF strategic planning course of that dared to look past campus and introduced native authorities leaders and neighborhood stakeholders into the planning tent. This on the very rational grounds that UF can’t be a terrific college except it’s surrounded by a terrific neighborhood.
Consequently we have seen UF and metropolis authorities collaborated on quite a lot of fronts, together with a downtown strategic plan and a well being clinic for east Gainesville.
And for the previous a number of months Gainesville Mayor Lauren Poe has been internet hosting a sequence of conferences meant to widen the town-gown partnership to additionally embrace the county, colleges, enterprise neighborhood, Santa Fe School and UF Well being Heart.
The impetus behind this was a 2018 report mentioning widespread racial inequities in housing, schooling, transportation, financial alternative and extra in Alachua County — inequities that can not be addressed, a lot much less solved, by one entity or one other appearing in relative isolation.
“The truth is it is being left as much as every establishment to deal with the disparities beneath their explicit umbrella,” Poe mentioned. “We have to handle how the entire companions can higher align their very own plans and discover methods to collaborate on frequent objectives.”
What earlier collaboration efforts lacked — Martin’s LOGIC being a chief instance — was a proper organizational construction that would endure regardless of turnovers in elected and appointed management.
Poe introduced the Group Basis of North Central Florida into the discussions, in the end to suggest an working mannequin that would maintain ongoing collaboration.
“The most important reached out to us to assist conceptualize” what such a corporation may appear like, mentioned basis President Barzella Papa. “It’s essential for the general neighborhood good if our establishments are in common and intentional collaboration.”
She added, “It has been carried out in different communities very efficiently.” Papa cited, for instance, the Basis For a Wholesome St. Petersburg, created to deal with problems with racial and financial disparities in Pinellas County.
Poe mentioned that members within the discussions shall be requested to return to their respective organizations with suggestions to purchase into some type of organized collaborative effort.
As Poe mentioned, “We may have new management” at UF, on the Faculty Board, on the metropolis and elsewhere. “I really feel like that is an incredible alternative, with all these new faces coming in with new enthusiasm, to determine one thing that may actually assist Gainesville over a protracted time period.”
Which sounds virtually Sid Martin-like in its logic.
Ron Cunningham is former editorial web page editor of The Solar. Learn his weblog at www.floridavelocipede.com. E mail him at ron@freegnv.com.
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This text initially appeared on The Gainesville Solar: Ron Cunningham: Gainesville must collaborate on frequent objectives