A Cup of Conversation – August 2014

The city recently mailed out a notice to all merchants that city personnel can no longer spend any time collecting on slow-paying accounts, specifically business license and parking district participation fees. The fines for late payment will be assessed at or up to a thousand dollars per day as determined through a court hearing. (The average combined fees per merchant are probably around a few hundred dollars per year). No signature, no dear so-and so, no sincerely anybody.

I’m breaking one of my cardinal rules here but as a long-standing merchant I had to shake my head when reading the letter because it occurred to me this is a classic example of the difference between “public” and “private.” I’m a realist so understand there is no free lunch when it comes to running a city or a business. Without timely revenue streams, everything comes to a halt very quickly. It’s the method and process wherein the difference lies.

In private enterprise, if I sent out a notice like this one to our customers, we’d be out of business the next day. From time to time we have to collect from slow-paying business customers and it’s never pleasant but always handled with diplomacy and a personal touch. Recently, we had a dreaded wholesale price increase which required a hundred personal phone calls and/or face-to-face conversations. There is nothing like looking someone in the eye to deliver less than good news and everyone respects and appreciates you in the end. In a public domain, few care because there is little fear of losing something when there really should be. Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. I’m not blaming the individual and not our city hall per se. For almost a quarter-century, we’ve enjoyed great personal relationships with dozens of outstanding city personnel including the last of the great small-town sheriffs like Mike and Dave. We’ve benefitted greatly from city staffers going beyond and above what the job required to keep things moving along in our special little hamlet.

However, there is a broader culture of government which produces insensitivity to the very social norms and graces required in personal relationships, especially in the marketplace. I think over decades this divide has been unchecked and expanding dramatically. I’m sure this kind of letter would never have been sent twenty-years ago and not because city cash flow was freer back then but because the “culture of civility” never would allow it to happen. All one has to do is look at the recent arrogance and unaccountability of a few Internal Revenue Service employees and management personnel. This is an issue transcending politics because it’s something we all are subject to regardless of how we lean. It’s a human issue, a civilization issue with grave consequences for everyone and we had all better pay attention.

Recently our mayor stepped-in to suspend a city-issued moratorium on sandwich-board advertising on the streets of Jacksonville. I think Paul saw something inherently wrong with not only the ban on something so essential to the merchant’s livelihood but equally a detachment of civility and sensitivity in the process of how the ban was implemented and enforced. Anyone who doesn’t think a dozen more customers a day produced by a sandwich board doesn’t make a difference for the small merchant and subsequent public treasury is just not paying attention.

Thank you, Mayor Paul. I guess I’m not imagining things and my mother was right. It is not so much what you say and do but how you say and do it.

Be good not bitter.