Board to get leadership training

By Zachary Marano
[email protected]
An organizational culture survey presented earlier this month painted a rather unflattering picture of Leelanau County government. One of the major takeaways was that the county board of commissioners needs some training to govern more effectively and stop “stepping over boundaries,” in the words of the report.
The board voted 4-2  Tuesday to enroll themselves in a Michigan Leadership Institute (MLI) governance training workshop at no cost to the county, to take place in late January or early February. The main point of controversy appeared to be the MLI’s choice of instructor: Chet Janik, the county’s administrator from mid-2012 to 2023.
County commissioners Kama Ross and Jim O’Rourke voted no. Commissioner and board vice chairman Doug Rexroat was absent from the January regular meeting with prior notice, so only six commissioners voted on Tuesday.
“I did vote last week (at the executive session) to move this forward, but I have been giving it some very important thoughts,” Ross said. “Chet would do a wonderful job, absolutely, but I feel like he is too close and he has too much history with what we’re trying to change.”
Ross said that she would prefer to wait until after the board’s committee of the whole meeting on Jan. 24. John Amrhein, a governance educator with Michigan State University Extension, is slated to present at this meeting, and Ross argued that the board should hear his side on approaching governance training.
“I voted for Chet to do this because he knows this county inside and out. A governance workshop is just reminding us what our statutory duties are. It’s just training in what we can do, how we can do it, what is legal, what our statutory duty is. So, it’s not that he’s coming in to talk about other issues; this is just training,” Commissioner Gwenne Allgaier said.
MLI regional president John Scholten recommended that Janik conduct this governance workshop after he presented the results of his organizational culture survey on Jan. 3. This survey asked employees to rate the work culture on a scale from one to 10, with one being broken and 10 being healthy. Scholten said the average score was a “concerning” 3.8.
Janik posed a similar question to employees when he started as administrator, and back in July 2012, county employees ranked Leelanau County services at 8.2 out of 10. Of course, this was long before the previous board made the controversial decision to strip control of county finances and HR duties from the clerk’s office and give them to new departments in May 2021, which the 2024 report says is still a major fissure.
During the first public comment period at the start of the meeting, the board heard from Probate Judge Marian Kromkowski. Kromkowski read directly from a collaborate letter signed by herself, County Prosecutor Joe Hubbell, Sheriff Mike Borkovich, Treasurer John Gallagher, and Register of Deeds Jennifer Grant, quoted below:
“We believe (Scholten’s) findings appear to echo the staff and elected officials’ comments, provided first to Commissioner Wessell and then to Commissioner (Kama) Ross. We don’t know who said what, nor do we have any intention of sanctioning or encouraging any further efforts to secure the notes from, or the identify of those who provided comments,” the letter reads.
“They were assured confidentiality, and that must be honored. To do less would be a disservice to the county employees. Further, we reject the notion that all three of these individuals receiving comments either fabricated or exaggerated their observations. The comments referred to in Mr. Scholten’s report are similar to complaints that some of us have heard or overhead from staff,” it continues.
“It is time for the board to move on and accept these findings as either perceptions or reality. It does not really matter which they are. To reject them would be disrespectful not only to those who gathered the comments, but to the 85 staff that participated in that survey. We also believe that it would send a very unflattering message to the public and all future personnel applicants if no action is taken on employee concerns,” Kromkowski quoted.
These five department heads also supported the separation of finance and human resources duties from the clerk’s office; conducting an independent wage scale study of all county employees; and developing a code of conduct “based on civil discourse, cooperation, transparency, acceptance that we are all here with specific duties, and agreement that we would not overstep our prescribed boundaries.”
However, the letter also makes a point in expressing appreciation for the efforts of the current county administrator, Deb Allen. In Scholten’s report, Allen is compared unfavorably to Janik with the latter’s “doors more open (sic).” The letter says that Allen “stepped into a sea of conflict, hidden agendas, and now the recent exodus of valued employees” and is not to blame for the departures of several department heads.
Despite this appeal from Kromkowski and the other department heads, Commissioner Ross faced resistance when she motioned to accept Scholten’s survey as presented and move forward to include “all voices … and to come up with a plan to create a more positive climate.” This was only approved by a 4-2 vote later in the meeting, with commissioners Melinda Lautner and Jamie Kramer voting no.
“We have employees in this courthouse whose voice just was silenced,” Lautner said. “We’re expected to go forward with some employee comments, not all employee comments, even anonymously. I see that my fellow commissioner (i.e., Ross) wants the employees who were not represented in that survey to come forward and speak up so we can act on facts and not hearsay. Yet, there were no facts – at all – represented with this report. Only hearsay.”
Lautner further told Kromkowski that she was “outside (her) lane,” a comment that chairman Wessell said made him uncomfortable and he disagreed with it.
“There are two sides to every story. It’s also extremely detrimental and unprofessional to put a survey out the way that he did… the whole entire time I was in awe of what I was looking at. It looked like a 7th grade book report. And I apologize to Dr. Scholten, and I’m sure he was well-intentioned, but that was not what I expected, nor was it what I thought I would pay for as a board,” Kramer said. “I would like to apologize for my part in voting for this.”
Although these two commissioners voted in opposition to accepting the survey results, Kramer candidly admitted that while county government needs “healing,” and doesn’t know how to address it.
“He was asked to do a survey – a survey (that) did not have any stipulation that he would give all the raw data,” Commissioner Ross said. “This is so disrespectful. I’m sorry, I just can’t sit in this room when this level of disrespect is being shown for our employees, for myself, for the public who has to listen to this. It is time for us to accept and say, ‘This is not perfect, but it’s time to move forward with action.’”