Paul Warr-King is the current President of the Gresham City Council.
We sincerely would like your vote to re-elect him to Position 5 of the City Council.

More Access and Candor in Citizen Relationships with Councilors and City Employees

I heard a speech one time entitled "A Focus On Results" given by the Mayor of the City of Milwaukee which summed up my thinking as to what you as citizens of a community expect to receive from the money they spend for local government services:

"Citizens care about efficiently provided services, lower property taxes and fees, safe neighborhoods, employment opportunities, clean air and a broad range of recreation opportunities. They care about results. They care less about inputs, about how we are organized, about which department is responsible for what. The problem is that sometimes we have a tendency to view the world from a departmental perspective rather than from a customer's perspective."

When I joined the Council in 2004, I came from a management background in the highly competitive industry of banking. There we constantly strived for better customer service, reviewing cost efficiencies, being innovative for using new systems or how could we structure the best proposal, and being accountable to achieve certain established goals. Riding in on my white horse I thought that I could establish some of these principles in my new government position and try and change the pervasive atmosphere that surrounds the lack of public trust in government by improving the transparency of our activities and changing employee attitudes to one of providing customer service.

I was pleased to learn that the new City Manager, Erik Kvarsten had similar goals. He had already started to break down the department silos of traditional organization boundaries and encourage employees to have more open access to questions from Councilors and to develop efficiency improvement ideas.

As a result of this encouragement and a change in the "corporate culture "around City Hall, and the emphasis on expanding Council Citizen Advisory Committees, I feel that we do have an openness for citizens to easily relate with the Mayor and any City Councilor as well to deal directly with employees for specific problems. I agree its not all perfect but customer service attitudes will evolve over time as new employees are hired who will easily adopt this change in the internal corporate culture structure.

If you have a question or comment on the above, please email me directly at pwarrking@msn.com

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Please join us in re-electing Paul Warr-King
to Gresham City Council Position 5

If you would like to make a contribution, help us with the campaign or
just have a question please feel free to contact us at:

pwarrking@msn.com

"Bringing the experience, dedication and knowledge we need in Gresham"