Pittman and Friends Podcast
Welcome to Pittman and Friends, the curiously probing, sometimes awkward, but always revealing conversations between your host, Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman - that’s me - and whatever brave and willing public servant, community leader, or elected official I can find who has something to say that you should hear.
This podcast is provided as a public service of Anne Arundel County Government, so don’t expect me to get all partisan here. This is about the age-old art of government - of, by, and for the people.
Pittman and Friends Podcast
Running Anne Arundel with Christine Anderson
What if transforming a forgotten historical site could truly energize an entire community? Join us as we sit down with Christine Anderson, Anne Arundel County's Chief Administrative Officer, to uncover the inspiring journey that led her to reshape local governance. From her educational roots at Michigan State and George Washington University to her influential roles in the Maryland General Assembly and Maryland Department of Transportation, Christine's dedication to public service has been unwavering. Her pivotal ascent to Chief Administrative Officer in 2022 marks a new chapter in her career, where she continues to channel her passion into effective leadership and community development.
This episode explores the finer points of service delivery and budgeting within local government, and details the County's efforts to streamline processes and enhance transparency. Discover how initiatives like the new electronic permitting platform and the PAVE program support efficient governance and encourage minority business participation.
Addionally, hear Christine reflect on leadership, including adapting management styles, building trust, fostering a diverse team, and offer valuable insights for anyone interested in public service.
If you like the stories and insights in Pittman and Friends, be sure to follow the County Executive on social media and sign up for his Weekly Letter using the links below.
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Welcome to Pittman and Friends. The curiously probing, sometimes awkward but always revealing conversations between your host, anne Arundel County Executive Stuart Pittman that's me and whatever brave and willing public servant, community leader or elected official I can find who has something to say that you should hear. This podcast is provided as a public service of Anne Arundel County, so don't expect me to get all partisan here. This is about the age-old art of government of by and for the people. I am here with the Anne Arundel County's Chief Administrative Officer. Her name is Christine Anderson, and if the name doesn't sound, if the title doesn't sound really important, I'll tell you that it really is important.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:This is the person who, when I'm incapacitated, according to the charter, becomes the county executive and that has happened or at least I've been out of town and Christine has taken over. But it's also the person who all of the department heads in the county report directly to. So one could say Christine runs the government. So, and I will also start by saying that when Christine agreed to do this job she said she doesn't like to be out front and in the public and loves to be behind the scenes. So I'm sorry.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Still true to this day.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yes, yes, so even doing this podcast was not your choice, it was mine, so thank you. So first question I have for you, christine it's multiple choice. You can only choose one, and the question is do you like love or just do your job for the paycheck?
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:That's actually an easy one. I love my job. I am honored that I get the opportunity to serve. I'm a lifelong public servant. I love what I get to do. I love working with such talented people that run local government and it's kind of a job I never thought I would actually have on my resume. So I am really enjoying the opportunity and I love it every day.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Good. Thank you. I love it when people say that, because I can remind you of that on the really bad days. That's fair, or when you're asking for a raise or anything else.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Right, Also fair. You're doing it because you love it.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Great Good, we got that established, all right. So before we talk about why you really love your job and all the great things that you do in your job, tell me how you ended up in this job, starting with school. Okay, you can start with any year of school that you choose and through the jobs that you've had, that brought you there.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Okay, my origin story, as you were, got it. So I grew up in Michigan and went to Michigan State, very proud Spartan alumni, and while I was there I interned for a state legislator and really fell in love with the work that he did representing constituents. At the time I didn't think I wanted to be an elected official and I can assure you 20 plus 30, whatever, however, many years later, still do not want to be elected. But I really fell in love with how government runs, how policy decisions are made, how funding decisions are made. So as I was leaving Michigan State getting ready to graduate, I decided to go on and get a master's. So I attended George Washington University in DC and have a master's in public policy from there.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Shortly after that I needed a job, so I thought I would work in state legislatures. So I applied to a bunch of different legislatures and ended up getting hired here by the Maryland General Assembly. So I spent five years advising the General Assembly on budgets, working to different legislators and legislative committees, and then after a while I felt like I wanted some management experience, which is hard to get here in the General Assembly.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:That would be the famous DLS right.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:The Department of Legislative Services.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:The building that is being rebuilt right now, right next to the Capitol. And what I've been told is that that's where all of the great people start out, because you'll learn everything there.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Yep, you learn everything there. You learn how government functions, you learn how to write well, you learn how to take numbers and tell a story behind it. You learn how to work with people across the aisle. You learn how to work with advocates and community members and legislators and people from every walk of life, and it's great, great training ground. You are with people who are similarly educated but all come from different backgrounds as well.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So all the young, young aspiring public servants out there. Keep that in mind. Although you can get a job with accounting too and it's a pretty good start, absolutely Come apply to.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Anne Arundel County. Yeah, so I love the experience. But then wanted to broaden my horizons a little bit, so I was very lucky to be hired by the Maryland Department of Transportation. So I worked there for a number of years in a couple of different roles, including at the airport and with the Transit Administration, and then, and I might add, with the current Secretary, paul Wiedefeld, who speaks very highly of you, and so Paul is definitely a mentor of mine and I'm thankful for the opportunity he gave me way back when and it's fun to get to work with him in a different capacity now.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:He has a very hard job.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:He certainly does, Certainly does so. In 2011, I wanted a different challenge, wanted a shorter commute, so I got hired here in the county as the assistant director for public works and then later eventually also ran inspections and permits for a period of time as the acting director and then was asked to take over central services, which is a little known agency that is the backbone of a lot of fun things in the county. And then in 2022, you called me.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I did. I did and I knew a thing or two about you. When I called you, I came in. I think the first time I met you was we were elected and then there was a month to do transitions before we actually took office and you provided us, as the head of central services, with a room, a conference room, to meet in and it had glass doors and glass windows that everybody could look in when they got on and off the elevator. And you kindly had your team put up paper taped to the wall so that they couldn't see through, so nobody could see who we were meeting with that we might be hiring to work in this administration because we were doing our interviews. So thank you for that.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Well, past practice was to do that. So give you a little bit of less of a fishbowl feeling.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I actually think that a few days in I pulled down the paper because I said we were going to be a more transparent administration.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:You certainly did and that's what we've continued to try to do. But then, once I was in office, you were the director of central services, which deals with every agency in county government facilities primarily, but also purchasing and fleet, and I can't list all the bureaus of it, but it's a huge department that whoever is running it really knows the inner workings of county government. And I guess I always thought of you. As you know, you were promoted during the SHU administration and you'd been through a lot of administrations and I really didn't know, you know, what your values were. You were just a machine who got things done, but over time I did come moving boxes with her team. I was impressed by that and I was impressed by a number body in that seat in that office.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I looked around the county and it became. I immediately thought of you because you had so much experience and I knew that you were a get things done person Yep, sometimes a tough person like I'm really nice and too nice sometimes and I needed a CAO who could say no as well as yes. And you have not let me down there. So we'll get into some of that in a minute, but I do want to say that the very first day, I think, first you said yes. That took a week or so and a little bit of conversation and you thought it through. You can tell me how quickly you actually made that decision.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:But then you appeared, I think on day one, with a bunch of charts, and the charts were some changes in the organizational structure that you had laid out, but also specific major initiatives that you knew I had campaigned on. That were my priorities, but I think some of them were things that you had wanted to do for a long time. This may be a little bit unfair, but I have that with me. I have your list of things you said you would accomplish and this has never been done before. But this podcast is actually going to be your performance review Great.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Are you good with that, or are?
County Executive Steuart Pittman:you going to leave?
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Bring it on, bring it on, all right Okay.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So just tell me what you were thinking as you put that initial work together.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Sure. Well, again, I see this as an incredible opportunity that I was given. I traditionally in my career have been unaffiliated nonpartisan work for both Republicans and Democrats, so to be hired to be the second person in command, the right hand I really did give a lot of thought to that because I really pride myself on being able to work with whoever is in office. But I like the vision that you'd set out. There's things you wanted to get done and in this second term I felt like I could help deliver on those because you needed somebody behind the scenes, enough to know how government works. It's not enough to have the idea. You also need to be able to get things done, bring the right people together to talk about it and what needs to happen, how policy gets rewritten, how a procedure manual works just the little nuts and bolts that I really like, and I think that's fun to be able to work on those things.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:So when you asked me to take the job and I was giving thought to it, I'm also a very organized person and I kind of think in a. I mean, I feel like I can do both. I can think big picture and then I also can like operationalize that, get that down into a set of steps. And so, approaching this job, I knew that I needed to hit the ground running and I needed to know what your priorities were and what I wanted to set the team up to be ready to do. So I paid attention to what your priorities were and then I buried in a couple others that I felt like it would be great if I could tackle that myself, because these things, for example, the personnel policies it's something that people in government like to say oh, that doesn't work, oh, that doesn't work. And here's a chance for me to be a leader from within to make things work, and the great news is on that one. Today we're further ahead than we've ever been in terms of being able to onboard people quickly here in the county.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So don't get ahead of me here. We're going to get to the three P's, you know personnel permitting and purchasing right. All of those were areas where we wanted to make the process better. But let's first talk about one that's on your list here. That is really exciting, I know to you and to me, which is Crownsville, and folks, I think, know that we acquired Crownsville Hospital Center grounds from the 500 and some acres in the middle of the geographic heart of our county from the state of Maryland, and previous county executives had said no, we, we don't want it. Even during your term, you, as head of central services, are the person who understood better than anybody what it would mean to acquire this land.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:I think I tried to talk you out of it, didn't.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I, you didn't really try very hard because you knew it was a lost cause. So tell me, tell me, well, you can go right from your first reaction and how you came to terms with it to today, where you have created a structure and brought in all the agencies that need to do work and have a real vision, and I know you're as excited about it as anybody at this point.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Yeah, absolutely, you're absolutely right. When I was in central services and the idea of taking on 500 acres of buildings that had not been cared for for 30 years 69 buildings, to be exact, thank you and many of them falling down and in bad shape very sad situation actually. But to take that on and just know what that means in terms of staff workload and funding needs, it's a horrible idea to a director of central services. However, that's just what we do. We take whatever is coming our way in local government and we figure out how best to adapt. And obviously I could see the vision. Certainly it's a very large tract of land in the center of our county and we need to be better stewards of it not only the land itself, but the stories of everyone who was impacted there and their families. So, yes, I am totally on board. I understand the vision now and completely support it.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:We have a great group of staff that are the heads of agencies and they're all responsible for, kind of, I would say there's like two main things going on.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:There's the current day-to-day housekeeping just what are we doing to keep the lawn mowed and work with the current tenants? And then there's the big picture vision process where we've got master planning underway, lots of community outreach ongoing. So, in terms of the day-to-day things, we have a group that meets every two weeks and we just talk about what's going on and was there a water main leak and who knows what, and what about the tenants, and just to make sure that we're being good stewards of today of the property and try to take care of it just a little bit better. Property's been used for years for soccer games and that continues to this day. Lots of great work has already been happening on the property, but we can do so much more and I'm really excited about the master planning process and that's really going to chart the course over the next I don't know two, three, four generations for what that property can be and what it can mean to the community. So I'm very excited about that.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, yeah, I am excited too and I'm thrilled that we've got really experienced people in there from public works and everywhere doing the work. And it is complicated, folks. In case you didn't realize this, it has its own water treatment facility, it has its own water tower, it has all these underground lines, most of which don't really work or they're going to have to be replaced, and so it is complicated. But from the very beginning you had your crew out there weed-whacking like it hadn't been weed-whacked in many years. I was a little worried the buildings would fall down once we took some of the ivy down Took the vines yeah.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So it immediately started to look better and, of course, we got Rec and Parks engaged, because it's going to be Crownsville Hospital Memorial Park and some of the first work will be that.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:But the master plan is coming out, the draft, and then that will be reviewed, lots of public engagement on that, and then we should have something solid by the end of the year that we can start to implement Awesome, okay, now let's jump into those P3s, because it seems boring. Everybody I know we're going to talk about county purchasing, county permitting Well, not county, but the permitting that residents and builders have to do and trying to make that process more efficient and quick, and personnel hiring and the processes that we use for that. So if you could just give a and I was really excited about this because this is the stuff that administrations have been trying to get better at.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Government is cumbersome. Sometimes it's because the legislative body creates a lot of laws and rules that don't necessarily integrate with each other, and we have to figure out how to implement them when we do the administration side, and so we are making progress. Tell us about some of the progress. Sure.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:So someone once described me as an administrative type with the heart of an ops person. So to me it doesn't matter if you can work, that's like no heart.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Is that what you mean?
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Nope, I found that you actually have a heart, a really big one, but yeah a bureaucratic process that protects you and protects government from being sued and, you know, is the most perfect way to do it. But it doesn't mean anything if the operating agencies who are delivering services to the community, to citizens, if they can't work it, if it doesn't work for them. So there's always this balance between why do we have a process? If it's too cumbersome, we should just have no processes, or we should just let each department do their own thing. There is value in both sides to that argument and I really try, I think, in my work to bridge that gap.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Everyone I encounter in county government is really here for the right reasons. This is really just about delivering services to the citizens and I love local government for that. You walk out of your house in the morning and there's a paved street and there's a street sign, and there's a school and there's a sidewalk and there's a fire truck and there goes the police car. All of that is services that government is providing for you, and people need to be better able to coordinate it. So the operating agencies are out there every day doing really hard work.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:And what do they need? Well, they need people and they probably need supplies, cars, uniforms, whatever it is. Those are the personnel processes to get the people on board, and the purchasing processes to buy the stuff in a way that we are spending our taxpayer dollars most equitably and efficiently, hopefully with as many local businesses as we possibly can. And so just how we go about doing that without making it take a lot of time and slowing things down, and, oh, it takes forever to be able to buy anything in the county. This is the piece of work that I feel like goes unseen, but if you pay a little bit of attention to it you can really go through those processes and understand why do we do each step here and take things out of the process to make it go faster?
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Permitting is a little bit different, because that is one of the Ps, but it is where Let me just say on purchasing that you brought in a deputy CAO, hannah Dyer, to lead a group of county agency people to come up with ways of making things more efficient, and part of it required going to the county council and getting them to let go of some places where they're intervening in the process and slowing it down. Intervening for good reasons, for public oversight, but some of it was inefficient and got it done.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Both on personnel and procurement, and I'm really thankful we had the partnership with them that they understood that there was maybe some things that they didn't need to see. They didn't want to see as often as they see it, and we've created reporting structures so that they are informed and aware of what's going on in the procurement and the personnel world. But we can take some days off the total process time, and so I'm thankful for Hannah for leading that effort and also the legislature for feeling like they agreed with that and that they passed those bills for us.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And that's hard stuff and it only happens if we, the administration, present a compelling case and have good relationships. So kudos on that one. So on the performance review okay, you get a checkmark on that and you get a checkmark on Crownsville Doing. Okay, how are we doing on permitting?
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Permitting is a really wide issue. Permitting is everything, from someone coming in saying I want to build a deck, all the way up to a large developer who's got a development plan already approved and now they just need to build the thing, and they need to build it in a way that it is safe, and that involves a lot of different trades and disciplines and all of those have to be inspected. So on the side of sort of the more straightforward things, the team was already implementing a new electronic permitting system, so we are much better able to track someone's request, any request that comes in and provide people with information. They can go online anytime and see the status of it, which is a really huge advantage where before you physically had to walk into a government building and hand your paper over to be reviewed.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And I'll just say that we have an interview with Jack Martin, who runs IT, who helped put that together with inspections and permits, and while there were some hiccups along the way and difficulties contractors learning how to use the system, I'm, for the first time ever, getting compliments about how efficient things are being run at inspections and permits and how people like the new system.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:So yeah, yeah, I hit checkmark there too.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:And I think that people think, oh wow, this is broken. All of government is bad and that's. We don't apply that standard to any other business and to any other discipline. So I feel like it is a disservice sometimes to the people that do this work, that choose to be public servants. They really are trying to do the right things and sometimes we haven't given them the right technology, Sometimes they haven't had the right training and sometimes, you know, it's just a matter of everyone needs to see each other's perspective in order to move things along a little bit more quickly. So it's no one here is trying to be a roadblock, although some from time to time end up serving that function unknowingly and unwittingly.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So I'm looking at these little boxes and we've covered a couple of them. But within the procurement side of things you've also got increased minority business enterprise contracting and we're about to do an event to do an executive order in a new program called the PAVE program, after doing a disparity study to look at our contracting. What have you been doing there?
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:I'm really passionate about this. I'm really proud of the work that we've already done, where we spend at least 20%, and sometimes much higher than that, with minority businesses. So that's a woman-owned business, a veteran-owned business or a business owned by a person of color, also small businesses and local businesses. We try to emphasize that as well. We are very careful, though, that we are still spending taxpayer money, and so we can't just only focus on minority business contracting. We need to be thinking about are we getting the best value, are we getting the best price for this? Because we certainly don't want to overpay.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:But even with those efforts, by focusing on outreach, by finding the businesses that are doing this work and reaching out to them directly, we're doing really, really well in terms of our contracting goals. I can say we can do better. We always can do better, and so the program that you just mentioned is another step forward in that direction. Really excited about it, you're going to be announcing a business enterprise coordinating council, which I think will be really wonderful to just bring together businesses to talk with government about what is working and what isn't working, be ambassadors back into the community, the contracting community as well, and I think that that will definitely help in achieving what we're really trying to go for, which is we need to be supporting businesses that are doing this work, supporting government as best we can, and it's a great tool that government has.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And one of the things that the consultant said and is saying really to all of their clients at this point is that increasing the capacity of the minority businesses in the county to be able to deliver on these contracts is a huge part of the way counties or any jurisdiction is moving forward, and our IVP program Inclusive Ventures Program over at Economic Development is doing exactly that, Something I'm also really excited about.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:I didn't have anything to do with that one. You can't give me a checkbox for that. No, and I feel really strongly. It's not just about awarding a contract to a minority firm. They need to get the money, so we need to be spending with them, and some of our expenditures are done in a way where it's $25 at a time, so it's $100, it's $1,000, it's a small amount, and we're missing out, if we are focusing only on awarding a contract, that what if that contract never gets used? Then that minority firm doesn't see a dollar of it. So we really have to be focusing on both of those things in order to build wealth in the minority community.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Okay, All right, we've got some check marks there, making progress. Still lots to do. Let's talk about budget, because for me, budgeting is Chris Trumbauer often says this our budget officer. It's an expression of our values and it is the time of year that makes me most nervous, most hopeful. It's really. A lot comes down to the budget how we're able to deliver for our residents through the budget. You sit next to me.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Generally in the meetings where each department head comes in, we have the budget office and their team. Having done research in advance, you have certainly heard from each of the department heads about what they're going to ask for. They ask for things. Sometimes they defend continuation of things. The budget office thinks should be cut. Generally, the budget office is the fiscally conservative voice in the room because, trying to make the numbers work and talk about how you see your role, I will say in advance I wouldn't want to ever do it without you. You've been so full of information and you remember things so well that you often provide the voice in the room that if my memory was perfect, I could probably do, or if I had time to do all the meetings you do, but you're really, really helping to balance the conversation.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:But how do you see your role in that and do you like the budget process?
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Well, I appreciate the comments. Thank you very much. I don't remember half as much as I would like to remember, so I'm good, I'm helpful there. I do like being part of the budget process. Again, that's where I started my career. I was a budget analyst at DLS. That's what I did, and so I appreciate the role that the Office of the Budget is trying to provide. They're trying to help you build a budget that reflects your values, recognizing that money is not infinite and that we cannot just spend, spend, spend. We need to be very strategic in how we do that and what programs we approve and what things get funded.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Sometimes I think that, because I have some operations experience by that I mean I'm older, I've been around a while, I know how government functions there are real impacts to not funding something that is unintended, and so I do try to speak up when I feel like, hey, there's going to be an unintended impact here that maybe we need to look at something else or a different way to go about this. And sometimes you have to spend money on the stuff that isn't the exciting. Write a press release, open you know, cut a ribbon, open a facility. It's the underlying structure, things like IT, or the cars or the facility that the people work in in order to provide services, and so sometimes I just try to help focus on that. Sometimes too.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Well, thank you for that, and you have backed me up sometimes when I would say to you I really want to fight for this one, let's get our weapons and yes, of course I get to make the decision ultimately, but it really only works as a team when you bring people on board for the decision and really articulate it well.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:And I appreciate that you not only expect me to do that, you give me the space to do that, to speak up, because it's just not always possible. Oh, I love it.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I love it when some of you all argue with each other and I sit back and listen. We notice the smile on your face. Yes, yes, but that's how we get to the truth, get to the right answer. Yeah, hey, I got two more little things here. They're not very specific. One is you know we talked about. Well, I mentioned that I hired you in part because you can be tough and you're willing and able to say no, and I knew that. But at the same time, you are the first call for these department heads in a crisis and it's absolutely essential that they trust you. You can't just be the tough one, the person who says no. So tell me what you've learned in this job, or maybe previous jobs, about how to manage when you're at the top.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:That's a really wonderful question. I love thinking about this. So, first is, we really do have an amazing group of directors. I kind of feel like we're playing aces right now.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Everyone in the cabinet knows their subject matter, they know they're part of the store, so to speak, and they're experts and we can trust them to make the day-to-day decisions. When they're letting me know about something going on, it's a sign of trust and faith that they know they need to let me know so that I can let you know and that we can make sure we're coordinated. But I also know that I don't have to be in the middle of their business every day because I know what they're doing. I think one of the things that and they're all different people, by the way, so they need to be managed differently Some people want to have weekly meetings with me. Some people want to send me updates on a regular basis. Some people are like hey, don't call me, I'll call you, and I can trust that that's the case that, unless something's blowing up on their end, I can take faith, knowing that things are working well for them. So it's really a matter of just understanding how each person needs to be managed and how they want to be worked with. I also really see them all as colleagues, not necessarily as, as you just said, me at the top.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:I have had to get comfortable with that, though, because, as you said, I am at the top of the org chart and I am the person looked up to.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:There's this concept I was reading about in in a book recently where, in Hollywood, they put together the, the list of the cast list, and it's not order of appearance, it's like who's the biggest deal, all the way from number one down to the last person. That's maybe brand new to acting, and there's a theory that the number one sets the tone for that set or that play or that TV series, whatever it is, and it's an idea that's been rolling around in the back of my head, because I wasn't comfortable with that two years ago. This idea that, like, oh, being the number one on the list or the number two under you is it's that everyone is looking to see how I set the tone. I've gotten more comfortable with that over the last couple of years and I feel like I've stepped into that, and that's an experience I wouldn't have had had you not given me a chance to do this job, so it's actually easy because we do have such a great group, but it has been a good learning opportunity as well for me.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Good, yeah, it is hard to be at the top sometimes and I can kind of identify with what you're saying, because I was a little uncomfortable being at the top, in fact intimidated frankly, by department heads who knew a whole lot more than me and still do. I'm less intimidated because I've found, you know, developed the relationships.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:But you have to be very comfortable with that. You cannot be intimidated by people knowing more, because there will always be somebody who knows more than you on some subject. And getting comfortable with that really allows for real leadership, because then it can be a coordination and a conversation.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, so, and I've watched you in your relationships with some of the folks who you know thought, well, why her? Why did you put her above me? And now you're over them and you have deliberately and in some cases had to work at it. I've seen the trust growing. So congrats on that. Check on that one, thank you. You're so far getting a pretty good grade here. Okay, last one you already addressed the issue of working for Democrats and Republicans and how public servants just have to do that. So I'm going to change what I was going to ask you a little bit and say and ask you if you have advice for me, how am I doing? You don't have to go into all my strengths and weaknesses because you know that's not necessary, but just advice for me or any county executive you've worked for a bunch. There will be others in the future. What makes a good one?
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:That is an interesting question and I didn't warn you in advance. No, what makes a good county executive? Well, first, for you, you have done a great job of assembling a team. You did not care who they worked for previously. You evaluated each person based on what they did. You gave everyone a chance to perform, to be willing to adapt to new ideas. It wasn't just about are you a D, do you have an R after your name. It was much more about the way that they lead and are they willing to.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I couldn't tell you, looking around the cabinet, who's got a D and an R. In fact, everybody seems aligned in their values at this point, so I couldn't care less. Yeah.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Well, and I think there's, as you said, intimidation. I think if you're newly elected, you're probably looking for who's loyal, who's not, who's going to work against me.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:That's what everybody told me to do.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Yeah, and I will say in my time sure, there's a couple of people that are probably like that, but they're not throughout government and they're not at the tops of every agency, and you'll do better by kind of being quiet and listening and talking to people, getting to know them, and you'll root them out pretty good.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:They'll root themselves out basically pretty quickly. So I guess that is advice I would give to any county executive. Talk to lots of people, get a sense for and it can't be a personality conflict. You know a lot of times well, she says no, so she's not good at her job. Well, maybe she needed to say no, maybe no was the correct answer in that situation. And you also have to get comfortable with not everybody's going to like every decision you make, and so you just have to be sure you've consulted with the right people, heard all the information that you're not being rash in your decision making, and then once you make a decision, that's the decision, and you communicate it clearly and evenly with the facts that you use to get to that decision, and then you move on to the next thing, because there's always something next.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:You've actually helped me do that, thank you. Sometimes it's just the look and the okay, it's time, pittman, we've made our decision and you need to be firm here. And then, of course, watching the way you do it and watching the way everybody does it. My advice to any county executive or potential county executive is you better listen, because if you're not listening, you're going to mess up, and there's a lot of smart people around the government and within the communities too.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:Well, and government's been here at least we've been here since the mid-1900s and government will continue. Local government needs to exist to provide services that people just need in their lives, and it would be inefficient to try to have everyone procuring their own police force and their own whatever water and that. So those things will continue. It's just how efficiently they're run, how well they're spending the taxpayer dollars, what they're preparing for in the future. That's where a county executive can come in and really change the course of government.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Well, thank you, you have done well in your performance evaluation in public. We will continue to do the good work that we're doing and fortunately I can say that I'm surrounded by a team that you lead, but I'm surrounded by a team that really is able to get through anything and no matter what comes our way. I feel confident because we never know what's going to come our way, but we are well situated to manage it and deliver for our people.
Chief Administrative Officer Christine Anderson:I would not encourage you to do public performance evaluations for everybody, but I was glad to be here today, so thank you for this opportunity.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Okay, we won't turn the podcast into that Good idea. All right, thank you.
