Earl Willford was the Director of Labor-Management Programs at the Minnesota Bureau of Mediation Services. He was well known throughout the State for his work with public sector unions and their management groups. He was instrumental in the establishment and growth of many Labor-Management Committees among Minnesota’s public sector employers. Mr. Willford died suddenly in 1996. The Twin City Area Labor Management Council named its annual award for excellence in Labor-Management cooperation and partnership in Mr. Willford’s honor.
We won the Earl Willford Award this year for our labor-management cooperation and partnership concerning a new initiative: Right-Of-Way Vegetation Management.
The Problem: State and County road rights-of-way looked shaggy and unattractive due to cut-backs in maintenance efforts. They looked bad and it reflected poorly on the community.
The Primary Complainant: Me. I complained because I thought it looked bad.
The Discussion: I asked our Labor-Management Committee (LMC), which is composed of IUOE Local #49 (the union that represents our Fleet Services, Street & Park Maintenance, and Water Utility employees) and managers of the same employee groups, to analyze the problem and to develop a range of solutions.
The Solution: The LMC developed a range of solutions and decided to do the following:
1. We asked the State and the County if they would increase their maintenance efforts (mow the weeds, trim the grass in the median, etc.) along their roadways. They said they would not.
2. We then reevaluated what the City currently mowed. Through years of custom we had been mowing areas that private property owners should have been mowing. We informed the effected property owners that we would stop mowing and that they would need to start. This created the resources (human and equipment) that we needed to take on the new mowing and vegetation management efforts.
3. We dedicated these new resources to the task for mowing and maintaining the most visible and most ugly road rights-of-way. We asked the State and County for assistance again for traffic control to complete the new tasks safely. This time they agreed. That was helpful.
The End Result: The end result of the new process was a cleaner and more attractive community. We could not have achieved this result without the cooperation and partnership between the employees who actually did the work and the managers that work with them on a daily basis.
Good process. Good result. Good award.
