Lisa Patt-McDaniel attended Leading with Vision, Value and Strategy in April 2001. Since that time, most of the division’s senior staff has also attended the program. Office chief since 2000, Lisa joined the Office of Housing and Community Partnerships in 1990 as a field representative to the Appalachian counties in southern Ohio. Her office administers more than $100 million dollars in federal and state grant funds annually.
Lisa used the strategic triangle model to help her develop a strategy to significantly change one of her Office’s major grant programs. The Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), a federally funded program, provides community development funding to counties and small cities based on their low to moderate income population. Since inception of the program many years ago, the Office of Housing and Community Partnerships staff believed there was a problem with how the funds were allocated. As Lisa describes, “it was a numbers versus percentage game,” and the smaller, but neediest, counties received less funding even though they had a much greater need and a higher percentage of low-income population. The CDBG dollars were critical to these small counties because they helped leverage additional funding.
Lisa’s goal was to change the allocation formula so that the neediest counties received a greater share of the funding. But the Office of Housing and Community Partnerships had been unsuccessful in implementing such a change several years previously. The proposed change had been strongly opposed by the large counties who stood to see their funding reduced. These counties mounted a campaign to fight the proposed changes, including bringing a bus load of people to the hearing, and the status quo remained.
Now eight years later, Lisa and her staff remained convinced that greater public value could be created by changing the funding allocation. But it was a sensitive issue and Lisa knew that to be successful they would need a political management strategy.
This time Lisa realized that not only would she would need to get input from all stakeholders but that a new allocation formula would have to come from the stakeholders themselves and not simply be developed by Lisa’s department and delivered a fait d’accomplis. So Lisa proposed something that the department had not done before: she convened a group of some 30 stakeholders and charged them with finding a way to get more dollars to those areas with the greatest need.
Lisa made sure that the group represented all stakeholders, including those counties in favor of changing the allocation, those against, and those somewhere in between. In addition, she invited the County Commissioners Association, regional planning entities and elected officials to join the group.
The group met over a period of approximately six months. Lisa’s staff provided assistance, did research and gave the group points for consideration and discussion. An OSU intern did additional research and gave the group various formula scenarios. Lisa said the group took its task seriously and there were a number of heated discussions.
After much work and vigorous debate, the stakeholder group recommended a solution: take a percentage of funding off the top of the total dollars available, and set those aside as a separate fund to be awarded on a competitive basis to the most distressed counties. The formula allocation for the remaining funds would remain as it had been in the past. There was no opposition at the recent public hearing and Lisa has received no complaints to date about the new reallocation.
According to Lisa, this was not a typical process for her department, and while it was a risk and a challenge for the department’s staff, the successful political management of the stakeholder group was key to changing the funding allocation and, thereby creating additional public value.
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