The original item was published from January 24, 2018 2:37 PM to March 5, 2018 8:38 AM
After nearly six months as your City Manager, I feel it is the appropriate time to expand the opportunity to communicate about ideas, initiatives, and issues related to our City. I also continue to seek out various ways to engage more often with residents on these topics and this blog will help in that effort. While the City’s Facebook page and my Twitter feed will continue to serve an important role in communication and engagement, I am willing to show my age a bit and say they just don’t provide enough space for me to feel comfortable that the topic of discussion has been provided adequate attention to be truly beneficial. There are a lot of great things going on in the City and a few challenges that we wrestle with each day, and it just feels like more than 280 characters are necessary to discuss them in a meaningful way.
Not to worry, we are still going to use those social media accounts to keep you informed of what is going on and to enable you to follow me around town as I go about the City’s business. But it is my hope that these blog posts will allow me to dig just a bit deeper into topics that I feel are important. This blog will focus on what we do and how we do it as your City government. Some posts will focus things that are going on in our City that I believe are important to share and discuss. Other posts will allow me to share some of my thoughts about what it takes to be a great City and a great City government. Through this blog, I also want to take a look at what other communities are doing well and explore how we might learn from them.
I will try my best to keep the posts relevant and, if not exciting, at least not boring! I will be as forthcoming and transparent as possible and I welcome your comments and suggestions for topics of interest. It is my intent to generally post a new entry weekly on Mondays, more often if warranted. I will start next week with a post about my observations of Roanoke and of the City government thus far into my tenure with an emphasis on how I intend to position the organization to best respond to City Council’s priorities.
I look forward to making these posts each week and hope you find them informative and valuable as we all continue to work to keep Roanoke a great place to call home!
- Bob Cowell