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Teamwork, communication can make city great

By Tom Bonfield, Pensacola City Manager

Pensacola's city government has a new structure, one designed to improve communication and services and enhance our ability to meet the needs of individual neighborhoods.

Related departments and services now are aligned together to facilitate communication.

For example, we are giving renewed attention to neighborhoods, the building blocks of a city. Therefore, we have linked together the units which provide core, day-to-day services to neighborhoods. Police, Fire, Sanitation and Fleet Services, Leisure Services, and Streets and Traffic are united under City Manager Al Coby. Bringing these agencies into one division enhances awareness of each department's work and lets us find opportunities to provide more assistance to each other.

In addition, these departments will work with a new unit, Neighborhood Services. This group will help neighborhoods either create organizations or bolster existing organizations and focus on specific community wants and needs. Each neighborhood has its own unique personality; our job is to deliver the appropriate mix of services.

All business enterprises are clustered under one assistant city manager, Robert Payne. This wing includes three major businesses -- Pensacola Regional Airport, the Port of Pensacola, and Energy Services of Pensacola.

West Florida Regional Library System, the Saenger Theatre and Bayfront Auditorium also will be a part of this group. All three have strong entertainment/education/culture components to go along with their business aspects.

A newly created division -- Economic and Community Development -- brings together four related departments -- Planning, Engineering and Capital Projects, Inspections, and Housing. These departments often work with each other on projects -- dealing with housing or building matters, for example -- and will benefit by sharing one assustant city manager, to be hired soon.

This structure also enables the Community Redevelopment Agency, to focus solely on conceiving and fast-tracking important redevelopment programs. We look forward to more projects of the quality and scope of Palafox Pier and Aragon, the new downtown housing development.

Several other departments report directly to the city manager because they deal with management issues such as finance, communication and personnel. These departments include the City Clerk, Financial Services, Information and Technology Services, and Employee Services.

I welcome comments and suggestions for improvement of Pensacola as a community where we live, work and play. As government employees, we must continuously emphasize communication and improved services if the city is to serve its citizens properly.

 

From the City Manager's Desk: