Comity on Committees

There’s been a great deal of consternation lately about the Montgomery Village Foundation board tasking staff with examining and proposing potential improvement and possible reorganization of our committee structure.  

In the last few weeks, I’ve heard a lot of comments on the topic.  To say that some of our residents are upset is an understatement. I can’t explain the thinking of the whole board, nor should I. But as a board member, I hope to air my personal view in this space.

This exercise, to me, isn’t about "eliminating" committees or "disrespecting" the current membership. I started down this path with a set of questions:

• We’ve done a great deal to re-organize MVF operations internally, and the results are proving themselves at our bottom line. We’ve never been able to do more with less. Given the happy results, is there something we can be doing to deliver more value to the community for the effort our volunteers and staff put in?
• We are going to be facing new and substantial challenges in the next five to ten years. Both the master plan for this part of Montgomery County and our Town Sector Zoning are shortly due for re-work by the County–-with or without our consent. The lessons we learned in dealing with the HOC and the Webb Tract issues tell me, at least, that our best chance of persuading our county and state governments to take our needs into account is when we respond quickly and with a chorus of voices sounding similar themes. Which then brings me to the question: "How can we organize the committee structure to optimize the timeliness and consensus on any topic without sacrificing the expertise built up in the committees?"
• There is a finite time-span that most residents want to serve. They may welcome the chance to participate for years, maybe even decades, but those who will sacrifice their free time (if they have any at all in this economy) aren’t in infinite supply. How do we best insure the continuity of quality in any given committee as its membership turns over? We don’t have loyalty oaths or litmus tests for opinions [nor, in my view, are they desirable]. So how do we capture the human and intellectual capital we have and make sure we don’t exhaust our volunteer resources? 
• Increasingly, we live in a world where the "cycle time" of government is shrinking-–processes that once involved years of public comment and study are more often being contracted to months. Sometimes, we don’t even have the "luxury" of a regularly scheduled MVF Board meeting, let alone convening an advisory process, before a government or agency wants its response.      Is there a way to allow key committees to work on an expedited basis to give us advice against these new shorter timeframes? Would different organization or expanded committee functions be appropriate?

We’re neither Dudley Do-Right nor Snidely Whiplash here. I just don’t believe that having the temerity to ask these questions makes us heroes or villains, just human beings (with all their prejudices and flaws) trying to make sure our residents get the best out of the "blood, sweat, toil and tears" invested by our volunteers and staff.   

Our "ad-hoc" committees have a wonderful track record from Transportation Policy (I remind people that the MVF does NOT support MidCounty Alternative 4, modified or not), to Audit (which I personally believe could reasonably expand its reach to Budgeting), to the Committee on the Environment (which I hope comes out even more central to our goal of being a "green" community).  

Our newer committees (Long Range Facilities Planning and Vision 2030) are achieving both success and recognition within and outside the Village. New members and new faces are at the table, and we welcome them all.

But we’re going to have to do a lot more government outreach to preserve the best of the Village. We don’t want to construct duplicate functions and surely we don’t want to plunder the existing structure. So it seems prudent to ask ourselves "How do we organize to meet that challenge?"

A wonderful record can only be sustained by investment-–of time, of resources, and of good stewardship. That, dear neighbors, is the perspective from which I approach the issues--how do we best empower success?

So please, bear with us as we puzzle it out–-for none of this is obvious or easy--we need to keep what works, and align ourselves to make sure it stays working. If a little change here and there results in a healthier ecology for us all--let us bear in mind that objective.   

To paraphrase Stephen Millich, "I may be wrong, but I don’t have the luxury of being uncertain."