Pensacola Mayor Ashton Hayward has seen his job approval rating drop to the mid-30’s after seeing it soar to nearly 70 percent during his first five years in office. City residents believe the county commission, school board and even the city council are doing a better job than him.
His loyal supporters are having predictable reactions. They have either attacked the validity of the Quality of Life Survey or blamed the low ratings on the timing of the survey.
The Quality of Life Survey has been done annually in June for eight years. The methods and sample sizes haven’t changed. Until now, Mayor Hayward has touted his ratings. He even included his 2015 scores in his viewpoint that detailed his goals for this year.
Other leaders have faced similar challenges and made the necessary changes to turnaround their companies and institutions.
Two years ago, University of West Florida President Dr. Judy Bense was under fire. The faculty senate had passed a “No Confidence†vote in her. UWF had earned the lowest grade of all the state universities under the new Performance Based Funding for Florida’s Universities rating system, which cost the school one percent of its funding. Her experiment with Matt Altier to grow the university with a series of public-private developments had flopped.
Bense could have attacked the faculty, covered up Altier’s mistakes, or whined about how unfair the rating system was.
She did not.
To her credit, Bense realized that changes needed to take place at the administrative level. She asked Dr. Martha Saunders to add operations to her academic duties at the university. In October 2014, she appointed Saunders the Provost and Executive Vice President of the University of West Florida.
That decision turned around the school. Today UWF has its largest fall enrollment in its history. Benefactors are stepping forward to fund new programs at the university.
Bense took ownership of the problems and took action.
Mayor Hayward told the News Journal that he respects the data.
He said, “The most important thing for me is to find out how we can dig deeper, and we can improve.”
Bense began making changes almost immediately after the faculty senate vote. Within three weeks, she promoted Saunders.
What will Mayor Hayward do? And how quickly will he act?