I’ve written before about Whitewater’s search for a police chief, now concluded in the selection of Lisa Otterbacher as the city’s next, permanent police chief. (The remaining few steps are procedural, and simply met.) For an earlier post on the search, see During Whitewater’s Police Chief Search.
It was right to conduct a more public search process. Repetition of public processes is better over time.
It’s been only about five months since then-chief Coan’s departure, but as with many managerial departures, it might as well have been five years: people typically look forward, not backward. Most leaders, whether good or bad, are seldom long remembered – people pay attention to what’s close at hand, not managers who’ve retired.
Among the candidates in the field, two things may be said confidently: there’s no reason to think any was more persuasive than Otterbacher, and all were more persuasive than Coan would have been. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to imagine Coan being comfortable in so public a process. He was not supportive of televised commission meetings, as ironically the current commission president — who now lauds this very process — was once not.
Coan’s long presence is both Otterbacher’s advantage and disadvantage. It’s her advantage, because she follows that long, odd tenure, and is sure to be more conventional (as a genuine value) than Coan was as chief.
But it’s a disadvantage. too, as his long tenure doesn’t represent merely actions that were deeply mistaken, but omissions and inaction, the absence of what should have been. It’s hard for people to see, and feel, how much better things might have been, all these many years. What’s been missing entirely is harder to find.
Other towns nearby haven’t had the controversies that Whitewater has had because they didn’t have the chief, and chief’s policies, that Whitewater had; it’s that simple.
It doesn’t matter in the slightest what Otterbacher says of Coan’s long-enduring administration; it matters only how she acts in succession to it. His small but dutiful clique of supporters were useless to him in the end: his tenure ended poorly despite their many efforts, the consequence of own misguided policies.
It wasn’t a public relations problem; it was a policy and perspective problem. (I doubt among that number there are many who grasp, let alone admit, as much. It’s still true.)
Whitewater makes much, to her disadvantage, of the need for the ‘visionary.’ It’s mostly the neediness of small-town officials, and supposed vision descends into the grandiose, and from there to self-parody. Coan and Boden exhibited this striving need, as Brunner does now. It’s like crack for small-town bureaucrats.
(This is why, for so many of them, the answer to a mistake is simply to repeat, ever more absurdly, that all is well. Their supposed success is always another, sugary press release, another fawning story, away.)
If Whitewater finds some significant measure of normalcy from Otterbacher’s selection, it won’t be a small feat. On the contrary, if we wind up there after having been where we were, it will be a major accomplishment.
There’s probably no particular direction or perspective that will be necessary for success. There are certainly some directions and perspectives, having been tried, that are best avoided now.
I’ve no way of knowing how this will turn out, five or ten years on. Many of those who’ve played a role, of whatever kind, in Otterbacher’s selection will have retired from the public scene by then.
That probably seems like a lifetime from now; then again, her predecessor’s departure already seems like a lifetime ago. What she makes of all this is mostly within her own control and of her own account, as it has been for other leaders in the city previously.