SHOW NOTES
..What if a guy who has a vision for his community, hears about another guy who sounds just like him, and what if those two run into each one day in a barbershop...and what if, they happen to be from two different political parties, but decide to run together?
This PCC Local Time podcast episode include those two guys, Dan Dunigan, and Matt West. They ran for elected office in Lansdale Borough, Montgomery County Pennsylvania. Together with a willing team on Council, they realized goals that had only been dreamt of for years.
One of the first things they did was hire a new manager, our guest Timothea Kirchner who in turn brought in John J. Ernst, A.I.A., CBO to serve as Community Development Director and John Mizerak to help with strategy and funding. John Ernst is now the manager in Lansdale Borough.
In this episode our guests provide a picture of what it looks like to create organization and community readiness to achieve big goals. It is a story about an aligned team, succession planning and most importantly, vision.
It was my privilege to work with Lansdale on building an HR System during this period of time and I can say with confidence that the secret to this transformation was a community vision with people at the center.
We will start today with Matt West. Let’s join him as he talks about why he stepped up to the plate and put his money where his mouth was.
6:18 [Matt] I was getting my haircut. I was some Saturday morning, the local barber shop talking to the barber and he's like, oh, I hear you're running for council.
17:53 [Dan] To me, code enforcement has two sides to the book. It's not a yes and a no, it's a yes. And a maybe. And we had folks that had yes and no, and they were quick to find no for whatever purpose. And it created an environment in which the government wasn't working as it should.
What was the first big goal?
19:56 [Matt] …didn't take time at all. It was our unifying cry. It was our rally cry. It was what Dan was just talking about - customer service…and, a government cannot ever be run like, or be run as a business, but you can run it more business like, and so trying to take good customer service ideas and applications from the business world and apply that to the public world.
What was it about Timi that made you bring her in as Manager? What came together for you that said this is what we want to do.
23:07 [Dan] From day one she was able to make part of the vision Matt just talked about and that I had mentioned before….she made the cultural change effective, just walking in. She always commands a room when she walks in. Everybody respected her from day one.
Was there anything holding you back Timi?
26:47 [Timi] One piece of that meeting [with Council] that made me pause a little bit, and that was that one of the council members and this person who had been a former council member leaned in and said they wanted me to fire all the managers, not just the borough manager.
28:00 [Timi] For 30 years, these folks had not raised taxes, had even reduced taxes. And I knew what that meant. That was 30 years of not really improving the infrastructure of that community.
31:38 [Timi] On my first day…I deliberately brought the department heads together.
What did that period of time look like from your perspective Dan and Matt?
34:38 [Dan] …I was on my way to a meeting that night, but I had been churning out various spreadsheets trying to get your arms around how did the borough's financial picture get to where it is today and effectively they had been using reserves.
38:53 [Matt] We knew that there was gonna be a problem because taxes hadn't been raised since the beginning of time, and I'll never forget…the first budget presentation with Dan's 68% tax increase made news headlines…Timi was down in front of the dais, giving the presentation and all of us on Council were like, oh my goodness we gotta do it … 68%
38:53 [Timi] When I was offered the job, Matt, as president of council offered me the job and he leaned into me and he said, are you willing to accept a job that's only gonna last four years?
First impressions, John Mizerak?
52:44 [John Mizerak] When Timmy and I walked over to the parking lot, she said, what do you think? And it looked like a canvas…an unpainted canvas to me.
You gotta think about how you raise tax revenue in the community without raising tax rates. You need to think about how to raise tax revenues in the community and not have to worry about cutting services.
It was one, if not the busiest SEPTA stop in the region, it was one of them. That to me immediately said, what developer would not want to put a development here …I think the other part that struck me was the leadership that was there at the elected level.
And the other thing I saw was the willingness of the community to want to do something. Timi told me that this property had been identified in the municipal comprehensive plan for 25 years to say, there needs to be a development here.
And the question everyone kept asking was, why hasn't it happened?
56:44 John, could you walk us through how you worked with Lansdale to make this happen? How did you work with the Borough to bring all the stakeholders together?
Listen at 56:44 – 1:08:00.
1:08:03 [John Ernst] Timmy was right that when I came on board it was at a time when architects were not being hired and they were losing their job. I was out of work for about a year, but in the background to all that, I had been volunteering for the borough's zoning hearing board for about 14 years.
So I was somewhat familiar with processes and people and elected officials and things along those lines. But coming to this role from the private sector, there had always been a stigma from the architect's profession that working for a municipality was pretty much going to the dark side
…So I approached the process with some trepidation and I'll never forget Matt saying to me as an architect, you have an opportunity to design buildings one at a time he said, but what you might have an opportunity here at Landsdale is to actually to design a whole town and be responsible for the development of a whole community.
…So if you can maneuver your way through a code book, looking for the space in between the lines that provides an opportunity for some flexibility and that's where that conversation starts to begin.
…nobody's gonna invest in your borough if you don't invest in yourself. And one of them was the way finding program wayfinding signage..But before that, the initiative that she invested in was the branding piece.
…What does Landsdale say to everybody on the outside, looking in, what does Landsdale mean to the surrounding communities? What does it mean to the people who are working here, living here… we realized that we were investing in ourselves and we were part of a much larger project and it really all started to come together.
John, what was personally difficult for you during this period?
1:16:30 [John Ernst] …you don't have a lot of leeway to fail as a municipality with the developer because they are investing millions of dollars in an approval process …So when you say to a developer that we're developer friendly, that means an awful lot of different things to different developers, but primarily it means speed of approval and putting your money where your mouth is.
If you're gonna say it's gonna happen in this amount of time that I'm counting on you, because I'm going back to my investors and I'm giving them a timeline for when we can start doing this, you better be sure that you hit those deadlines. Because like I said, you only get one chance at that maybe two at the most with extenuating circumstances.
Any thoughts about what John Ernst is bringing forward from your time on Council?
1:18:02 [Matt] it just points to the original group's philosophy that we needed. Point the ship in the right direction.. and it wasn't just gonna be four years and done and walk away. ..it was a concerted effort to make institutional changes, to point the ship in a different direction, regardless of who's at the helm at that time.
…I love walking around the town with my family and look I had a hand in this and see how other people that I've never met before have made the decision to live here and raise their families here.
And they like the energy. That's what it's about. That continued energy. It's not just about us. It's about everybody who follows us. So I just really I just get I'm not gonna say emotional about it, but I just am really proud about how the Borough continues to move forward in this direction.
CONTACT INFO
Dan Dunigan, Vice President, Surety at Simkiss & Block
Matt West, Township Manager, New Britain Township
Timothea Kirchner, Leadership Advisor to Teams
John Ernst, Borough Manager, Lansdale Borough
John Mizerak, Director of Planning and Economic Development, Dawood Engineering
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
