Reflection

For the past few days, I've had the opportunity to shadow Town Manager Gilbert Davidson to several of his meetings to see what he does and how he interacts with community members. One meeting was with the Southern Arizona Homebuilder's Association (SAHBA). Members include representatives from A.B. Lecocq Construction Company, Pepper Viner, Miramonte Homes, Terrazzo Homes, and Southwest Gas. Agenda items included an update on SB1171 and wastewater issues prevalent in the region, as well as a discussion of SB1525 and impact fees for future and present development. I thought the discussion went very well, and served as an information session for the SAHBA board



Town logo



My second meeting shadowing Gilbert was for the graphics standards manual, prepared by Kelsie Hanson the Town's graphic designer. I found it to be very fascinating to see how the Town wishes to convey itself as a symbol, and what the new specifications and requirements will be as far as usage of the town logo and seal on memo, business cards, etc.





Town seal

For example, the town logo will be used specifically for non-official business, such as internal memos, notes, etc. The seal will be used for official town business, including official letters from the mayor and council, policy related items, etc. The colors used for each are very important as well, as over time different printing sources have changed the colors and strayed from the council-approved color palette (using blue instead of teal, or sandy brown instead of copper, for example).

Standards will also be set for power point presentations by the town. Kelsie created four different options, which I found to be quite useful since there are so many different departments in the Town, and what might work for one department visually might not work for another.

Reflection

Gilbert sat down with me and Amanda to discuss how we felt about our internship so far and what we see for improvement. I found this to be a very interesting question, and one that I wanted time to be able to better prepared for answering, especially since I'm new to the government sector and my time here has been a whirlwind experience. Overall, I feel this has been an excellent opportunity for me, having come straight out of graduate school. I have continued my learning experience in the real world by working in multiple departments and meeting everyone and learning how all the pieces of the Town fit together.

One thing that Amanda and I both came to agreement on with what Marana could do is to emphasize its role on the environment. While the Town certainly has preserved areas of the environment and built infrastructure to accommodate animal crossings and maintain natural water streams, I feel that it couldn't hurt to emphasize this preservation a bit more in the public eye. When rotating through engineering, I was amazed at all the work involved in building on the given topography (mountains, rivers, flood plains, etc), as well as animal crossings. While it is certainly exciting to promote the growth of the town and focus on what and who can come here, it is also exciting to promote Marana's interest in their surrounding environment.



 Finance Budget Book

In addition to my work with Community Development on redesignating the colonias located in Marana and my work with Emergency Management (and the booth design!), I've begun working on an intro to Marana's financial budget book that gets published every year. In an attempt to make the book more exciting to read to those who are unfamiliar with financial statements, the introduction section will accommodate a much more interesting overview of the town's history and demographics. A good example of this format would be Tempe's Community Profile. I am currently collecting as much information as I can from the census and from history publications. Combined with the Kelsie's graphic designs, we hope to have a pretty impressive finance publication. :)