This will be a long post, but I hope worth the read.
I am Mark Patton and a candidate for the two-years remaining of the open seat on the Lower Platte South Natural Resources District (LPSNRD) – Subdistrict 2. During this campaign, I’ve had many conversations about what makes someone an effective NRD Director. Normally, the discussion focuses on ground water, flood control, wildlife management areas, budgets, and property taxes. But I have increasingly found myself considering a more fundamental question: What does effective governance mean for an elected board like the NRD?
The LPSNRD has a professional staff with scientists, managers, and other specialists, expert in their specific responsibilities. The role of an elected Director is different. Directors represent the people who elected them to that subdistrict. They establish policy and priorities, ask questions, weigh competing needs, provide oversight, and ultimately decide how public resources should be used.
That requires judgment. And judgment is shaped by experience.
This is why I believe experience matters in this election in four fundamental categories: Leadership, Transparency, Technical Experience, and Policy / Fiscal Stewardship.
Leadership. My whole career has been about leadership. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy, I spent the first 20 years of my naval service as an officer in the nuclear submarine force, serving in positions including chief engineer and, ultimately, commanding officer of the fast-attack submarine USS Topeka (SSN-754).
A nuclear submarine is one of the most complex pieces of machinery ever built, operating not only in a hostile ocean environment but also training to operate in combat. Basically, a submarine has two enemies—your adversary, who may be trying to kill you, and the deep ocean, which is always trying to kill you.
Submarine operations are also unique. When submerged, you operate for extended periods without continuous communication or direct oversight from higher authority. You are expected to understand the mission, exercise judgment, and make decisions.
So how does submarine command relate to leadership on an NRD board?
One thing you quickly learn in the submarine community is that everything is far too complex for any one person to know all the answers—and that is especially true for the commanding officer. Effective leadership depends on strong “watch team backup” principles: being open to information, questions, and recommendations from anyone, regardless of rank or position. Without that culture, you put both the ship and crew at risk.
Serving on the NRD Board requires the same willingness to recognize what you do not know. I cannot possibly understand all the dynamics, communities, and competing needs across our region on my own. I can, however, seek out the people who do, listen to their concerns, ask questions, and make sure their perspectives are considered before decisions are made.
Listen, learn, and follow through: that is leadership on a government board.
Transparency. Transparency is fundamental to good governance. The public should be able to understand how decisions are made, why priorities are established, and how public funds are spent. When that process becomes difficult for the public to see or understand, government risks becoming more responsive to its own institutional priorities than to the people it serves.
Later in my naval career, I commanded Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego, California, with 72 tenant commands and a population of approximately 22,000. One of those tenants operated the Defense Fuel Support Point (DFSP), the Navy’s largest fuel storage and distribution facility on the West Coast.
Shortly after taking command, I was briefed on a closely held issue involving a significant underground fuel plume. Up to that point, it was believed that as much as one million gallons of fuel may have leaked over the years into the ground beneath Point Loma. When I reviewed the maps, however, I noticed that some of the monitoring wells near the known boundary of the plume were also showing fuel contamination. That meant we really didn’t know where the plume ended.
I directed additional testing. We soon learned that the plume extended at least to the base boundary, with private homes immediately on the other side.
At that point, I concluded that keeping information about the plume largely internal was simply the wrong approach. The people who lived next to the base had a legitimate interest in knowing what we knew, what we didn’t know, and what we intended to do about it.
Working with the local city councilmember, I held a series of public information sessions on the plume. As you might expect, disclosure of an underground fuel plume (which ultimately proved to involve several million gallons) adjacent to San Diego Bay generated immediate and difficult public reaction.
But transparency did not make the problem worse. It allowed us to begin rebuilding public trust, accelerate efforts to characterize and remediate the plume, and ultimately move forward with approximately $183 million in improvements to replace the aging fuel-storage facilities.
The lesson has stayed with me: Transparency is not about avoiding criticism. It is about giving the public the information necessary to understand government actions, question its decisions, and hold it accountable. That is essential to responsible government.
Technical Experience. The NRD has a wide range of complex missions, from flood control and land management to groundwater and surface-water stewardship. Technical execution of these responsibilities is largely the job of the NRD’s professional staff. But Directors are responsible for establishing priorities, providing oversight, ensuring fiscal accountability, and approving contracts and major expenditures. It certainly helps if a Director has experience managing complex technical programs.
Following 31 years of service, I retired from the Navy and was hired first as a Program Manager and later as Executive Director, leading a team of approximately 170 professionals providing environmental management, industrial hygiene, and occupational health services to NASA at the Kennedy Multi-User Spaceport, formerly Kennedy Space Center.
For more than 10 years, I managed and led technicians, scientists, medical professionals, and other specialists supporting the environmental and occupational health needs of this enormous and technically complex facility. Kennedy operates within one of the nation’s most environmentally diverse areas, incorporating the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and portions of Canaveral National Seashore and surrounded by the waters of the Indian River Lagoon system.
Our challenge was to help NASA accomplish its space-launch mission while protecting the land, water, air, and other natural resources entrusted to it. That work required more than understanding technical issues. It also required budget management, contracting, setting priorities, evaluating performance, and working with State and Federal agencies.
An NRD Director does not need to be the hydrologist, engineer, or environmental scientist. The Director does need to understand enough to ask good questions, evaluate alternatives, establish priorities, and hold programs and contracts accountable for results.
I can bring more than a decade of experience doing exactly that in a complex Federal environmental program. That type of experience matters.
Policy / Fiscal stewardship. The Board determines what the organization should accomplish and why. Staff should provide expertise, alternatives, costs, and recommendations, and then execute Board policy. A governance problem develops when staff recommendations become the priorities and the Board simply approves them. The roles then have become reversed.
Likewise, fiscal stewardship requires an elected Board to make explicit choices among competing uses of limited public resources: your property tax dollars. A technically worthwhile project is not automatically a public priority. The Board must weigh benefits, costs, timing, risk, opportunity cost, and the taxpayers’ ability to carry the burden.
Toward the end of my naval career, I served as Chief of Staff for Commander, Navy Installations Command, the organization responsible for managing and resourcing Navy shore installations around the world. With a headquarters staff of almost 900, we faced the daunting challenge of planning, programming, and budgeting for an enterprise where available resources were always less than the identified requirements.
It was there that I refined my ability to evaluate competing requirements, establish priorities, and make difficult resource decisions. Not everything that was needed – or even justified – could be funded. Priorities had to be tied to mission, risk, available resources, and long-term requirements.
The NRD is, of course, not a $10 billion Navy shore installation program. But the basic principles of policy and fiscal stewardship are the same. Public resources are limited. Priorities should be established deliberately and transparently, expenditures should support those priorities, and results should be measured against what the public was asked to fund.
In summary, I believe experience matters on a local governing board like the NRD. Throughout my career, I have led complex organizations, dealt openly with difficult public issues, managed technical programs, and made policy and resource decisions where demands exceeded available funding.
I believe those experiences can contribute to strong governance of an NRD that is efficient, effective, transparent, and accountable to the people it serves.
