This past week, the International City/County Management Association hosted their annual conference, which took place in Pittsburgh, PA. City of many bridges!

Speaking of bridges, one of the best values of these large gatherings isn’t just the session content but is really the connections between the people you meet before/after, in the hallways, or over meals or drinks. Or, the people you meet in really well facilitated interactive sessions….

Anyway, there were a couple things that were on the top of my mind this year. This year was different for me because it was the first time I can remember that I went to a municipal-focused conference and wasn’t working in a fulltime municipal capacity. It was actually nice to have some flexibility, such as not waking up at 5am to start furiously catching up on the emails/issues/fires you missed the day before while learning and connecting with people.

So I was interested in a few specific things beyond the normal catching up and hanging out with colleagues and friends:

• Understanding what sort of onboarding towns do or don’t do with new elected officials. This is a big topic at Rethink Local right now, and among many managers in the Upper Valley and beyond who would like to see more mechanisms that help new elected officials be more successful in their positions.

• How people were engaging or thinking about new technology tools and AI related technologies. I feel like there is a lot up in the air about how these will impact a lot about our world, and I remember many of the conferences 15 years ago predicting how platforms like Facebook and YouTube would “fix” politics… that isn’t quite what most people would say happened.

• Any updates or new ideas on issues surrounding retention and recruitment of staff, such as innovative shift/work schedules, incentives, etc on issues surrounding retention/recruitment of staff, employee wellness, mental health, and related topics.

• I was asked to speak/present on two sessions this year - one on podcasts/public engagement and the other a small panel about the unique challenges/opportunities in smaller towns and how important transparency is.

Here’s a bit about what I presented on if you’re curious:

Session One: Using podcasts to promote authentic and effective public engagement

I’ve lectured, hosted workshops, and written about this topic extensively, for example at ICMA Local Government Reimagined 2024, the Municipal Solutions Summit, and ICMA published a feature article about it in their June issue of Public Management magazine (link for ICMA members).

In this talk, I walk folks through some big picture ideas, such as the purpose of improving the “meta” policy - the space where all policies get discussed and decided - the Decision Making Ecosystem. We talked a bit about what this space is (pictured below), and why I believe it’s worth every penny to invest resources in directly improving it. We talked a lot about this in the MPA classes I taught at Seton Hall.

Then we broke into smaller groups and discussed participants most important goals in their communities to give them a chance to meet each other and learn what others are working on. We come back and talk about the backbone to accomplishing all of this, the mission, “authentic and effective public engagement” which I break down into its three parts “authentic,” “effective,” and “public engagement.”

We then dive into some more specific details about podcasts and what it takes to get one going, and lessons I’ve learned as well as lessons picked up from other participants in this and past sessions about this topic.

After going through those details and then re-summarizing the earlier points, I like to end by breaking back into groups and giving people a chance to discuss how they can take back to their community whatever they learned, and I try to circulate and answer some questions or take feedback about topics people wished I covered so I can incorporate those into the next iteration.

From large infrastructure projects, wanting more eyes on their budget, to public green spaces and parks, concerns about circulating misinformation, low morale among staff, there were a range of issues that people wanted to use podcasts and public engagement strategies to work on. It’s always a pleasure to get to provide people some ideas and support for ways that they can incorporate these strategies, tactics, and tools to make the lives of people who live in their community a better space.

Session Two: Leading a Small Community: Challenges, Solutions, and the Power of Transparency

This was a panel with Jerry Giaimis, a former town administrator and current Northeast Regional Director for ICMA, and Intashan Chowdury who has been the administrator for a small town in New Jersey starting in his early 20s for the last six years.

In this panel (which was filmed for ICMA members) we touched on a range of topics, from the importance of informal person-centered relationships in smaller towns, to the impact that very small numbers of people providing feedback can have and how to ensure representative community feedback, to affordable technology solutions that can help smaller communities, to how to engage volunteers and build a pipeline of community leaders without crossing political lines.

The session was really attended (maybe around 80-90 folks) and I had a lot of good conversations with people afterwards who were especially interested in ways to bolster how many eyes in the public were on what they were doing and how to turn that into more volunteers. Many small communities were represented, and providing more content for the smaller communities has been a goal of ICMA over the last few years.

There’s my really quick summary of the 2024 ICMA Annual Conference, which you can find the full schedule of here!