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Citygate Associates consultants Jay Corey, Bruce McClendon, and Keith Clarke complete successful Organizational Analysis of Salinas Community Development Department

After close to two hours of discussion and debate, Salinas City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to adopt a consultant’s report that, if implemented, promises to revolutionize how the city does business with business.

Voting 6-0 with Councilman Steve McShane absent, council charged City Manager Ray Corpuz Jr. to return in 60 days with tangible ways of implementing the recommendations in a $50,000 study from Folsom-based Citygate Associates LLC.

The report made clear to the council that resource and staffing cutbacks to the economic development and building permit departments hobbled the city’s ability to restart the city’s idled economic engine.

“Don’t expect great things out of a department that has not been properly resourced,” Corey said.

Jay Corey, a principal with the consulting firm, said the city blundered in applying blanket layoff, furlough, hiring freeze and resource reduction policies to the department – economic development and permitting – the very units that needed just the opposite in order to foster the city’s recovery.

Chief among Corey’s recommendation was that the city run its economic development unit as if it were a private sector business – rewarding great service and finding more ways to say “yes” to customers.

City Economic Development Director Jeff Weir and some of his staff in attendance Tuesday evening took a rhetorical pounding by some members of the public who recounted nightmarish negative experiences with staff.

Now with the council’s blessing, Corpuz Jr. will get to do what he was originally hired by the city to do in January 2012 – spur a new renaissance of economic activity in Salinas, a city arguably hit harder by the Great Recession of 2008 than most in California.

Jay Corey, a principal with the consulting firm, said the city blundered in applying blanket layoff, furlough, hiring freeze and resource reduction policies to the department – economic development and permitting – the very units that needed just the opposite in order to foster the city’s recovery.

Another key recommendation of Corey’s was to get the council to pledge to stop intervening in development or permitting issues so much. He urged the council instead to first back up its staff and then intervene only if an issue has not been properly resolved.

In introducing Corey, Corpuz Jr. said it will be his intention to introduce a new era at City Hall – an era where “faster, cheaper and clearer” describes the culture and how the city will relate to the economic development and building communities going forward.

View the source article at theCalifornian.com here: City Council adopts consultant’s report on economic development

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