Trust Isn't A Program. It's The Point.

Vol. IV. No. 45 - If residents don't come first, is it a surprise that they end up not trusting City Hall?

Photo by Rock Staar on Unsplash

There’s a mission statement that is at the bottom of every City Council agenda here in Troy. It’s a run-on sentence that reads like it was assembled by committee to offend no one while inspiring no one. It says the city is “committed to sustaining its continued prominence as a regional hub by providing a well-balanced community for its residents, businesses and visitors,” strengthened by “public/private cooperation” and “grounded in financial stability”. Read it twice. Notice who’s doing the acting in every sentence. It isn’t residents. It’s the city.

That’s not a grammatical accident. It’s a worldview.

Who’s the Subject of the Sentence?

Here’s a simple test for any local government’s stated purpose: who is the actor, and who is being acted upon? In Troy’s mission statement, the city “sustains,” “provides,” and stays “grounded.” Residents show up exactly once, grouped in a list alongside businesses and visitors — as recipients of something the government produces, not as the reason the government exists. A vibrant downtown, a growing economic base, financial stability — these are outputs. They describe what the institution wants to sustain about itself. None of them describe what a resident should experience, expect, or be able to count on from their local government.

Let’s be clear, this isn’t unique to Troy. It’s the default language of local government, or nearly any organization, everywhere, because it’s easier to write a mission statement about the institution than about the people it serves. But easier isn’t the same as right, and a decade-old statement that nobody in city hall can recite from memory isn’t guiding anyone’s decisions. It’s wallpaper.

This came to mind while I was reading an online article from the International City/County Management Association authored by Simon Sinek, an author and speaker on organizational leadership. He was writing about police work and how police departments operate in very challenging enviornments.

Purpose Shapes Behavior — Ask the Police Chiefs

Sinek, along with police chiefs Kelly McAdoo and Chris Hsiung, made a point (You can read that article here) that applies far beyond policing: purpose drives behavior, and vague purpose produces vague behavior. Tell an officer their job is “law enforcement,” and they go looking for laws to enforce. Tell them their job is “protect the vulnerable,” and the same person in the same uniform starts making different choices — because now they have a filter for the 2 a.m. decision with no policy manual in reach.

Local government has its own version of this problem. Tell a planning department their job is “sustaining regional prominence,” and they’ll optimize for growth, press releases, ribbon cuttings, and comparisons to other towns. Tell them their job is protecting residents’ ability to build a life here — safely, affordably, with some say in what gets built next door — and the daily judgment calls start looking different. Same staff. Same budget. Different purpose. Different outcomes.

Sinek’s group, The Curve, built their entire model around a hard truth most institutions avoid: trust can’t be mandated. You can require attendance, demand performance, and enforce a code of conduct, but you cannot order anyone — resident or employee — to trust you. Trust shows up only when people feel safe enough to be honest, and safe enough to believe the institution is actually built for them.

We’re Already Watching the Bill Come Due

You don’t have to squint to see what happens when that trust erodes. Across Ohio, a coalition of average residents are pushing to abolish property taxes outright — a blunt, expensive instrument, but one born from residents who no longer believe the taxes they pay translate into a government working on their behalf. Meanwhile, towns across the state are enacting data center moratoriums, and in places like Sunbury and Pataskala, residents are bypassing their own councils entirely to write ballot language banning big developments themselves. Add House Bill 695’s tangled fight over secret economic development deals, and a pattern emerges: residents don’t trust that their government’s decision-making machinery — consultants included — is built to hear them first.

None of these fights are really about tax policy or zoning. They’re referendums on whether residents believe the sentence “we are here to serve you” is true, or just something printed on the letterhead.

Trust Comes First, Not Last

The temptation in local government is to treat trust as a nice-to-have, something you build after the budget balances and the projects get delivered. Sinek’s reporting on Barry-Wehmiller’s 2008 furlough decision points the other direction: when Bob Chapman the company’s CEO asked everyone — himself included — to share the pain rather than lay off employees, morale didn’t just hold, it produced something unscripted. Employees who could afford it started quietly covering furlough weeks for coworkers who couldn’t. Nobody programmed that. People do that for institutions that have already shown they’re protecting them.

Local government rarely gets the chance to prove that kind of good faith, because too much of its language — starting with mission statements like Troy’s — never asked residents to trust it in the first place. Fixing that doesn’t start with a press release or a new consultant’s report. It starts with an honest look at whose interests a city says, out loud, it exists to protect. Troy’s current answer is prominence, stability, and growth. Residents deserve a better one.

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