Baltimore Orioles manager, Earl Weaver, was famously tough on 3-time Cy Young award-winning pitcher, Jim Palmer, because Palmer was so good that Weaver didn’t think the Orioles should ever lose with Palmer on the mound. Lexingtonians are hard on Mayor Jim Newberry because our expectations for him are so high. With our 1950s economy and our 1960s downtown, when will we become a 21st century city if we don’t do it under Mayor Newberry?
But Newberry is having a rocky first inning. Lexington thinks Newberry has a chance to be a Hall of Fame mayor and to make Lexington a world champion city, but so far, he hasn’t pitched his scholarship proposal very well and we’re afraid that if he doesn’t learn from the mistakes he’s made thus far, he might lose confidence in his “stuff” and become just another mediocre mayor.
Newberry made a number of mistakes when he publicly announced his visionary plan to grant scholarships to Fayette County high school students who seek STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) degrees. For starters, Newberry’s plan doesn’t seem to include a requirement that scholarship recipients stay in Fayette County and pay payroll taxes here after we pay for their educations. In a city that gets something like 80% of its revenue from payroll taxes, that’s a big deal breaker to many of Newberry’s hopeful fans. It’s as if he was in such a hurry to announce the plan that he didn’t think it through. What was the rush? It’s not as if Mayor Newberry is a manufacturer who has to rush his newest product to market before some competitor beats him to it. Newberry is the only mayor we have. He has a monopoly on bold mayoral initiatives. He can take as much time as he needs. Now he has to perform a sort of manufacturer’s recall.
When asked why the mayor’s scholarship plan doesn’t contain a provision to require scholarship recipients to work in Fayette County, the mayor’s press secretary, Susan Straub, cited difficulties in enforcing such a provision.
But what worries me most about Mayor Newberry’s premature release of his bold new scholarship product is that this and other good ideas are destined to fail if he doesn’t learn to properly pre-sell them. Failure to explain the problems we face before offering a costly solution is the kind of bush league mistake that failed politicians and failed marketers make. If Newberry is going to be the ace of Lexington’s pitching staff, he can’t ask us to pay for things until he tells us why we need to buy them.
I think Mayor Newberry overestimated Lexington’s understanding of the linkage between Lexington’s economic and education woes and I think I know why. There’s a small group of people who have been talking to each other about “economic development” and “workforce develop-ment” ever since Mayor Newberry took office and, in this information-rich environment, I think Newberry forgot there are voters and taxpayers out here who haven’t been in those meetings and have no clue why Lexington needs more science, technology, engineering and math grads. The mayor and the rest of his inner circle were way out ahead of the Great Unwashed on this. Unless he wants all his big ideas to be stillborn, Mayor Newberry needs to learn how to let the rest of us “catch up”. To the average Lexingtonian, the mayor’s scholarship plan looks like a solution in search of a problem, an unnecessary luxury that we can’t afford and don’t need. If I were issuing Mayor Newberry a report card for his scholarship plan I’d give him an “A+” for the idea and an “F” for the way the idea was communicated to people who haven’t been part of this conversation.
Spokeswoman Straub said Mayor Newberry “wanted members of council to have plenty of time prior to taking up the fiscal ’09 budget to consider the ramifications of the scholarship program. He also thought it was important to demonstrate the proposal’s widespread support among leaders of the education and businesses communities. So we brought together an unprecedented group of education advocates and members of the private sector who are firmly behind this program.” Straub noted that the coordination of so many schedules dictated the timing of the press conference, not an intent to exclude anyone. She added that the mayor’s office is receiving mostly positive emails in response to the scholarship plan
I think the mayor and his staff should have teased us a little with a sort of pre-announcement tour before “The Announce-ment.” First, the mayor and his staffers offer to go on any talk show, sit for an interview with any reporter and speak at every club, church and neighborhood association to pre-announce “The Announcement.” In the pre-announcement stage, the mayor and his cognoscenti explain that when Lexington tries to attract employers who can provide the high salary jobs that pay the bills in this city, the first thing those employers want to know is if Lexington can provide the highly-skilled workers these employers need. Pre-announce that you will soon have a major announcement to address this need. Show a little leg. Create some anticipation. It’s not that Lexingtonians are indifferent or stupid, it’s that we’re busy making a living, not attending the meetings you and your staff have attended.
Mayor Newberry, if you want to be The Education Mayor you have to take Lexington to school on the problems we face before you ask us to pay for solutions to problems we didn’t know about or understand.
Educate me at JosephHigginbotham@GMail.com