The grass is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. No, not at all. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered.
— Robert Fulghum
A couple of Daily Post readers emailed me yesterday, wondering if I had any insights into the rather sudden, seemingly simultaneous resignations of two key Archuleta County employees — County Administrator Bentley Henderson, and County Attorney Todd Starr — as announced yesterday on the front page of the weekly Pagosa Springs SUN.
The article was written by SUN reporter Avery Martinez, who has been covering the Archuleta County government beat for a few months now.
I first ran across Mr. Martinez back in about 2012 when he was involved in the drama program at Salida High School. I was in the process of trying to quit my job as editor of the Daily Post and had moved to Salida, Colorado with my partner Cynda Green to try and start a new life, and a new career. That plan didn’t work out, and I ended up back in Pagosa Springs, 18 months later, still editing the Daily Post.
Apparently, Mr. Martinez went on to earn a degree in Journalism at Fort Lewis College, and is now one of the key reporters at the SUN, helping to keep the community apprised of local government activities. The SUN has seen a number of staff members join their team, and then resign, over the past couple of decades. Maybe 15 or 20 people?
But the emails I got yesterday were not about turnover at the Daily Post, or at the SUN, but rather about the County government. Did the simultaneous resignations of two key staff members at the County signal some deeper management issues? A sinking ship, perhaps?
The SUN article suggests that the two key resignations this month were not related. Just two employees who, coincidentally, happened to pick the same month to submit their resignation letters.
According to Mr. Martinez, attorney Todd Starr has decided to go into private practice after nearly a decade working for Archuleta County. He had previously worked for Montezuma County, also in southwest Colorado.
Administrator Henderson, who has been working for the County since January 2014, apparently landed a job in Breckenridge as Assistant County Manager for Summit County. (I understand this was not the first time Mr. Henderson had applied for a government job outside of Pagosa Springs, during his tenure.)
I’ve had the pleasure of observing Mr. Starr and Mr. Henderson during more than a few public meetings over the past ten years (or in the case of Mr. Henderson, the past four years) and I’ve also had the pleasure of questioning their performance — verbally, at those same meetings, and in written form here in the Daily Post. (I personally hate having my own performance questioned, so I sometimes wonder why I’ve committed myself to a line of work that involves constant criticism of elected leaders and their employees. But, hey, someone has to do it.)
We’ve seen other County employee resignations in recent months. Executive Assistant and paralegal Tonya McCann, for example, left a couple of months ago after nearly a decade with the County. Public Works Director Susan Goebel-Canning had been with the County for about two years when she resigned last March.
Employees come and go.
But as one of our Daily Post readers mentioned, regarding the departure of Todd Starr and Bentley Henderson, people don’t normally quit their jobs simply because a better-paying job has become available. In fact, there’s a well-worn adage that “People don’t quit a job; they quit a boss.”
I think back on my own father, who worked for the Oakland Unified School District for about 50 years — but not in the same school building the entire time. I don’t recall him complaining about his job, per se, but I often heard him complain about his bosses: the various school principals he worked under. Some principals were wonderful to work with; some were awful. After his retirement, he continued to work for the District as a substitute teacher, up until my mom got sick and he decided to simply stay home and care for her.
But maybe, nowadays, Americans don’t feel the same loyalty to their jobs, and to the community they live in?
According to one article I came across yesterday in Inc. magazine, there’s a cost to replacing an employee, in terms of lost productivity, training, and so on. For a mid-level employee, the cost is around 150 percent of the employee’s annual salary. For an upper-level employee, the cost is closer to 400 percent.
If we believe those numbers to be accurate — and if we consider Mr. Henderson and Mr. Starr to be “upper-level employees” — then we might calculate that the loss of the County Administrator and the County Attorney, in the same month, is going to cost the local taxpayers about $800,000 to find and train their replacements, on top of the salaries we will pay the new employees.
Last year, the Gallup organization published a report called State of the American Workplace, using data collected from more than 195,600 U.S. employees via the Gallup Panel and Gallup Daily tracking in 2015 and 2016, and more than 31 million respondents through Gallup’s Q12 Client Database. This was the third iteration of the report. You can download the report here.
From that report:
Slightly more than half of employees (51%) say they are actively looking for a new job or watching for openings, and 35% of workers report changing jobs within the past three years.
Are we a nation of dissatisfied employees?
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.