Listening to Winfield Village President Deborah Birutis give her State of the Village, you would conclude she came from Lake Wobegon, since by her account, she is well above average. Just once, I’d like to hear her say what would be true of many: “Because of my mistakes, the state of the village has gotten worse.”
Even the worst village presidents prefer to focus on their successes and ignore their failures. The striking thing about Village President Birutis’ State of the Village address is, even the successes she claims are largely fictional. Judged by her own criteria, the speech was a catalogue of failure in almost every realm.
With three years left in her term, Deborah Birutis would like us to believe she has established “a positive, can-do atmosphere” in the village and “achieved some very ambitious goals.” However Ms. Birutis failed to mention what those “achievements” were. She took credit for Winfield’s A-1 rating by Moody’s for the 2003 water and sewer bond even though she was not part of the 2003 board which had the foresight to address the town’s infrastructure problems. What Ms. Birutis could have taken credit for was breaking a campaign promise not to raise water rates in the village and her part in squandering the $6.5 million bond issue on everything other than repairing our ailing water and sewer system. Ms. Birutis expressed excitement over the upcoming Town Hall meeting to raise taxes to fund the repairs for Winfield’s crumbling roads. When was the last time you heard a politician tell the voting public they were excited about asking for a tax increase to cover their incompetence? A tax increase which will be the largest in Winfield’s history. Her claim “all of this starts with a plan” was a George Strait moment: “If you’ll buy that, I’ll throw the Golden Gate in free.”
The phrase “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” works for village presidents too. Village President Birutis’ first year in office has been marked by failure after failure. Her only remarkable success, “the pedestrian underpass” – a project she happily takes credit for but in reality did everything possible to kill it.
Deborah Birutis’ weakness in her first year as village president has been her own inability to find her leadership backbone to really lead — that is, to focus on the most important problems, to articulate and then embrace new solutions even at the expense of challenge and hostility from her handlers at Winfield United.
As someone who supported Ms. Birutis, I have to say this rings true with me. The management literature is full of scholarship on how important the first six months, the first year, is to any chief executive trying to make a mark on an organization. But to take advantage of that early period, the leader must not only have a sense of what needs to be accomplished, but how.
In her first year, Birutis failed to identify the community’s needs and could not devise solutions or drive the process to meet necessary everyday goals. Birutis never made a commitment to keeping an even keel which is what gives a neophyte leader a small amount of credibility and in an ideal world, time and space to earn trust. To which I say, an even keel is great, but useless without a rudder — backbone — to guide the proper direction.
But as we look back on Ms. Birutis’ first year, much of what she has attempted and achieved has been a failure. From her abuse of taxpayer’s money, to holding discussions to disband the police department, to the lack of careful planning and targeted spending, we have witnessed Ms. Birutis’ failure to improve our economic base, repair our ailing infrastructure, and protect our investments. Instead she has ushered in a new era of overall stagnation and decline, careless spending, less police protection, and new taxes.
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