The King and I

Last Thursday, members of the Board of County Commissioners effectively slow-rolled and maybe stopped the restoration of the "King Louie" facility.

The site is a former bowling alley and ice rink, purchased at what appears to a be below-market price, for relocation of the Johnson County Museum and potential creation of a special suburbia museum. 

As the project gained potential traction, other uses for the facility were identified.  It is, after all, a huge complex with plenty of parking.  ABC used to broadcast "Wide World of Sports" Bowling Championships from this site back when ABC, "Wide World of Sports," and bowling all were things people cared about.

Advance voting was added to the list of potential uses.  Actually, I barked a bit about that initially because I didn't think enough was being done to truly address our advance voting needs if, indeed, it were to be used this way.

The county's facility department met with me and we spent considerable time conceptualizing what would be a very workable but modest advance voting site (comparable to what we do at Metcalf South, across the street and used in even years since 2006--however, we never know when our last election there will be our last and the shopping center will be demolished).

From the election office standpoint, I was fine with the plan.  Separately, I saw the arguments on all sides of this purchase. It wasn't my role to have a position on that.

Just before last Thursday's meeting ended, one commissioner suggested a task force be formed of the various building stakeholders to consider the fate of this property.  That suggestion didn't make it to a vote, but one might come up in a regular commission meeting.

I've toured the facility.  I see the warts and I see the potential.  No one asked me, and even if they do it might be a pity postulate request, but here's what I would do.

1. I'd move the election office there.  It's centrally located to the population in the county today, and for the foreseeable future.  It's large enough to accommodate the growth we need in our building for storage, a need nearly every commissioner and many county staff persons have concurred that we have.
   
   Doing this allows for us to consider a mega advance voting site, not one that has 25 voting machines and processes 35,000 voters over two weeks, but rather 100 voting machines processing 100,000 voters or more in a presidential election. 
   
   We can do it; I've done the math, and given all of the polling place and advance voting constraints we have, it's the kind of game changer that might allow us to operate with, say, 100 polling places in the county on election day.
   
   (Incidentally, if you look at strip malls and empty storefronts as I do, you'll notice there are fewer than we saw, say, in 2007.  Advance voting possibilities are hardly ample).
2. As part of the renovation, build an auditorium-type of training facility for 400, allowing us to conduct refresher election worker training at a county facility.  The building structure is conducive to this kind of idea, I think.
   
   Right now, we have to utilize churches and other facilities, and the rent for those is going up.  We're subject to limited availability and options.
   
   There is a need, I believe, within the county government structure for such a training facility beyond elections, so it would be available for other county uses as well.  We would simply have first dibs.  Further, it could be leased out to other organizations. 
3. Move the museum (which must find a home) to our current building.  The county owns the facility and it has plenty of parking for visitors in the numbers they have.  There is even the old "rectory" site adjacent to our property that the county purchased in 2012.  It could be used for better access/egress into this site.
4. Some of the other uses for the King Louie building could still be achieved.  As the Election Office, the site would be a terrific place for a transit station because it would make advance voting much more accessible.  The Enterprise Center--the county's incubator for new businesses--could still possibly have a home there and would be able to benefit from the training facility.  Who knows, we might be able to leverage some innovation into our operations as a result of that.

Of course, this all requires money, money which was expressly not pushed forward last week.  If there isn't a financing plan to use the site, though, it is my understanding that a note will come due requiring $3 million from the general fund in 2015.

So, it looks like some significant money will be spent, one way or another.

As I often say, I'm an idea guy.  Now it's just a small matter of implementation.  First, our leaders would need to buy in and, again, no one asked me.

I remind all that I am here to neither praise, nor bury, King Louie.  If the King can be part of an elections solution, though, it seems like it's worth, at least, a vote by the county's governing body.  At the very least, maybe these thoughts will be a good kickstarter for the task force suggested.

Playoffs? Don't Talk To Me About Playoffs!

When George Brett heaved a wild throw in the first game of the 1976 American League Championship series, I first heard a phrase, often repeated, that has stuck with me.

"Everything is magnified in the playoffs," the announcer said.

Make no mistake, presidential elections are administrators' playoffs.

Playoffs in sports are the time the success paradigm changes.  Instead of, "we can win if have this, this, and this," it becomes, "we would have won if only this."

Likewise, I often say that presidential elections expose the stress points in election administration.  We prepare with contingency plans, but there's always a, "I think this would have gone better if we did this" discussion.

Good election administrators were the kids in school who got a 99 on a test and immediately obsessed with the one mistake.

Our stress points in 2008, for instance, were facility-related, leading us to taking steps to address major facility issues.

In one case, we saw our little mail slot at our door couldn't handle the onslaught of ballots being dropped off.  The envelopes fell into a foyer and could have been soiled if the floor was wet.  So, we've since converted a window into a drop box a bank would be proud of, dropping the envelopes into a secure, locked room.

This election exposed some process issues--nothing serious, but when scaled became unnecessary time-eaters, from some changes we need to make to our website to poll agent forms to training.  There's never enough time to improve our training the way we want or to conduct the training the way we'd like, but we have some changes we will be making in this cycle.

"In this cycle" is an important phrase because this election isn't quite finished and we're already gearing up for the next.  We have an April countywide election and a primary for that election in February.

In fact, we have less time to prepare for the February election, after November, than we did to prepare for November after August.  The crunch mode continues through April.

All of us are asked frequently right now about how things must be slowing down and it's totally the opposite.  We have payroll to complete, voter history to finalize, election worker training ahead, and polling places to secure for the spring, for instance.  April's election brings new issues because election day is the Tuesday after Easter.  Some polling places won't be available, so we'll have to move voters, and our training will be impacted because we typically conduct supervising judge training the Saturday and Sunday before the election.

Spring elections are the most complicated, also, because of candidate rotation schedules.  Add to all of this the holidays, filing deadline in January, a new legislative session, and the fact that none of us have had a day off in months, or even have laundry caught up, and it is anything but slow.

Our staff will conduct a post-mortem of the election in early December to document all of the areas we want to address short-term or highlight as part of our strategic approach in 2013 and beyond.  We'll prepare a presentation in the spring related to all of those issues and I'll post it here.  This was the summary after 2008 (with a nod to Tammy Patrick of Maricopa County for a couple of stock photos):

Bocc Committee Of The Whole March 26, 2009 from briandnewby

One obvious area that must be addressed is our budget, particularly in staffing.  We are seriously understaffed, have been pointing this out for a few years now, and we're near a breaking point.  I'll have a post on that in a few days.

Another post soon will be related to the hot issue of the day--lines at polling places.  I've got some interesting math on what occurred to us in 2012, but, short story, we expected an average of about 140 more voters at each polling place, compared to 2008, because of our reductions.  We had 215.

The argument to reduce polling places was that advance voting has been so successful, yet even though  overall turnout was 7 points lower in 2012 compared to 2008, we had the most persons ever vote at the polls in Johnson County history.  This, after reducing polling places.

One thing to consider, that I'll get into with that post, is that all of this goes beyond simple capacity planning.

For now, this post is long enough--more soon.

Boom Goes the Dynamite.

September was a light month for posts not because we've been busy--we're always busy--but because I've been busy typing.

I'm not exactly sure, for instance, when video games lost their charm for me but after looking at computers, tablets, and smartphones for 10 hours a day, the idea of staring at a television for anything is unappealing.

Probably, the move from two-button controllers to 450-button controllers didn't help, either.  ("To make your player smile and wink while tackling with most of his weight on his left leg, hit shift+enter+red triangle+A while moving the joystick left diagonally 32 degrees.")

I type the same thing over and over these days:

1. "In the house!"  This is to acknowledge to a voter that I have received his or her advance ballot application.
2. "In the house and in the works!"  A slight variation from above, usually reserved for persons I believe to be hipsters.
3. "Here's the scoop on advance voting:" This precedes a link to our advance voting information on our webpage, at least saving me from typing three paragraphs.
4. "I've attached an application to get a ballot by mail."  Self-explanatory, and I've yet to forget the attachment this year.  Yet.
5. "We begin sending out ballots on Oct. 17." This is code for, "Please don't email me a week from now wondering why you don't have your ballot."
6. "If you don't have your ballot by Oct. 24, please email me." That could be a busy day, but hopefully the Postal Service won't let me down.  I like to provide a real day for a voter to target, rather than waiting until the Friday before the election before alerting us to an issue.  Too soon, and it's a waste of cycles.  Too late, and as I often say but seldom type, "It can only end in tears."
7. "Groovy."
8. "Aok."
9. "Aces." All my own geeky ways of acknowledging that I'm on the same page with the emailer.

Oh, looking for "10"?  Nope, just 9.  Oh, rats, actually--"Nope!" is number 10.  Somehow, I feel like nope, with a capital N and an exclamation point conveys, "I get it," with just the right urgency and whimsy.

Sadly, "rats" makes 11.  Sadly, "sadly" makes 12.

I often think how hard it would be to be a television anchor because every day's job is just like the one before.  Yet, I type so many things over and over again.  I've dabbled with cutting and pasting responses based on the question, but other than the links, I've never been able to stick with that approach.

To voters, their question is unique.  They deserve a personal response.  I like doing that and believe someday I will have personally interacted with all 372,000 voters in Johnson County.

It has kept me from posts, though.  Here was our excitement for the day--the "rectory" was officially torn down, leaving way for a plan we are hatching to utilize the green(ish) space for advance voting traffic signs.  More on that soon.  In the meantime, here are before and after photos.

Before

House, disposed, literally.

The Rectory and the Election Office

There's a little house next door to the election office that I often refer to as the rectory.

The set-up reminds me of churches when I was a kid, with a little house to the side of the church that housed several priests.  (A few years later, a couple of priests; later, "the" priest; now, an overnight house for the visiting priest).

Anyway, because I'm nerdy, I always thought how cool it would be to live there and walk over to the office.

The "rectory," which sits next to our office.  You can
see our sign underneath the left tree.

My wife, by the way, has never shared this dream.  And, the dream would be a depressing one if some day I wasn't reappointed as election commissioner and I sadly gazed out the back window to what used to be.  Plus, it would be pretty creepy for my successor.

Still, it would be cool.

And, NOW, the county has a chance to buy that house.

We've actually been hoping we'd move from this location because the building needs some costly love and our warehouse is full.  The place will handle about 2,000 advance voters each day in October but only about 150 fit into the building at any one time.

Buying the house could allow for the creation of a separate entrance and exit from the parking lot, something the Olathe police department would like.

Or, we could build a new office area in that place and convert our existing office space to a better area for training and voting.

Or, we could just have extra parking--now, during advance voting, we all park down the street in Sysco's parking lot (with their permission) and walk about a 1/4 mile to the office, right past the house.  If nothing else, we could cut through the backyard of the house and save a lot of the walking.

The house is worth approximately $100,000, so purchasing it seems like a smart move to me.  Worst case, it can be added to the area where our building is if the county were to sell it (our properly is worth about $2 million, and I think it would be worth more if torn down and built into a hotel--the economy kind of slow-rolled that possibility for now).

However, the valuation of our building has dropped about 20 percent in the past couple of years.  Perhaps this investment and parking lot modification would stave off further declines in this property's valuation (or bump it up slightly), recovering the investment.

The county ran into some controversy lately when purchasing a former bowling alley for possible future use as a museum, with a total investment of about $3.6 million.

So, even though this is a much smaller amount, there will be some trepidation to make the purchase.

The parks department also had its share of controversy recently after allowing employees to live in certain park properties tax-free.  The employees lived there as security for the park and to maintain the property.

With that in mind--unless my wife changes her mind in a hurry and we sell our house (unlikely, anyway)--the rectory concept will just be just that.

The item likely will be presented soon to the Board of County Commissioners.  It seems unlikely that anyone will ever buy that house to live in it because it's nestled in a commercial zone; the property is destined to be repurposed.

For nostalgia's sake, it will be a sad passing when the rectory is gone.