I used to work as an attorney for local government in Tallahassee, Florida and Ormond Beach, Florida. It simply amazed me how much time I spent trying to de-escalate problems that were brought to my attention for my attention but really weren’t local government issues at all. What they inevitably amounted to were Hatfield vs. McCoy situations with never-ending phone calls for assistance to a wide variety of departments and anger-riddled commission meetings at which the feud is fueled. These are the landscape encroachment, dog-peeing-on-my-lawn, loud bird, debris accumulation issues that will drive a neighbor to the brink of insanity. Karen L. Levian hits on these concerns in her recent blog Your Dog is Killing My Lawn.
Levian’s blog is timely for me as shortly after I joined the Upchurch Watson White & Max Mediation Group and helped to create their Government Affairs Practice Group I was asked to craft a neighborhood dispute resolution program specifically for a local government. The idea behind the program is that this local government’s staff spends so much time and money trying to resolve neighborhood feuds that it makes sense to hire a mediator, at the sole expense of the local government, to work toward resolving the underlying issue once and for all, an in-house mediator of sorts. I am familiar with the community dispute resolution programs which exist in many urban areas and which are run at no or little cost to the parties but the idea of a local government paying for someone to resolve such disputes was a novel one to me although certainly not a new concept in the business sector. I continue to work on creating the program and I am convinced that it will free up staff to work on truly important matters that are truly of local government concern and allow the feuding parties to get past their issues and on to bigger and better things.
I’ll let you know how it goes…..