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Health & Fitness

Bad planning and foot in mouth disease start our week in Palos Hills

Two items being discussed around Palos Hills make me cringe because they are symptomatic of an out-of-touch city government creating its own public relations problems. Both would have been so easy to prevent with a little more thought.

The first is the movie in the park. In casual conversation it sounds like so much fun. Madagascar 3 is being shown in Town Square Park on Wednesday, August 14 at dusk. These days dusk starts about 7:30 p.m. We love outdoor movies and concerts in the summer. It’s so much fun to sit under the stars and enjoy the summer weather with friends and neighbors. When you add in some movie popcorn and it’s a nearly perfect night. The sad part is we won’t be there. Neither will any of the other families we talked to in the past few days. Why? School starts on August 14. No one wants their kids out watching a movie until past 9:00 p.m. on a school night.

I’ve run a dozen different scenarios in my head for the scheduling snafu. I work in marketing, so I’m always planning multiple campaigns at once. The first thing my global team does is check for possible calendar conflicts in target countries. It’s a basic planning tool to make sure your event doesn’t conflict with something important already scheduled. Is it possible that no one at Palos Hills City Hall bothered to call the school district office to see when school started? In the six years our daughters have gone to local schools they always start about the middle of August. Was it really so hard for someone to call the school district to see when classes started to avoid a conflict?

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The other issue of conversation involves the circus coming to Palos Hills in August. It seems there is a charitable element to the show. Apparently Palos Hills city officials didn’t know about the charitable aspect and now they are perturbed by it. This disturbs people on two fronts. One, didn’t anyone from Palos Hills review the ads and posters? We just let some group come in and use the city name without any oversight. (Ok, that mostly disturbs me since I have a marketing background. I’ve never been with an organization as an employee or volunteer that didn’t have strict oversight on name usage.)

Most people are talking about Mayor Jerry Bennett’s need for some media training. Mayor Bennett is quoted in an article as saying:

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“We don’t let everybody and their brother in with their booths to try to solicit stuff,” Palos Hills Mayor Gerald Bennett told the Sun-Times. “It’s a family festival, and people go there with their families and not to be solicited by whatever causes are out there.”

How is it possible Mayor Bennett has spent so much time in office and hasn’t learned interviewing basics? He’s involved in all these civic groups in some leadership position or another and none of them provided any media training? A neighbor said, “I hope his shoe tastes good. It’s going to be stuck in his mouth for a long time.” As my college roommate would say, “Oy.”

I’ve done media training professionally for nearly twenty years. I’ve trained hundreds of people. As I read his statement I immediately rewrote it to say, “There seems to be a communications issue between the circus organizers and the City of Palos Hills. We’ll contact them immediately to determine the best way to move forward.”

Or, Mayor Bennett could have said, “We didn’t know about the charitable aspect, so we’ll want to do a little bit of research to find out more about the organization and meet with the circus management about the best way to move forward.”

These are the kinds of things professionals would say when faced with the same issue. These responses acknowledge the problem and provide a statement of reconciliation. At a minimum, neither one of those sounds as reactive and petulant as Mayor Bennett’s on the record statement, which is being criticized on the Palos Patch Facebook page.  One reader questioned if Palos Hills was angry that it wasn’t going to get a cut of the money. Another reader pointed out that the statement sounded dismissive. For someone in politics as long as Jerry Bennett, he should have a more thoughtful speaking style. His off-the-cuff comments make him sound cold and callous towards victims of domestic violence. There is no excuse for what he said on the record.

These errors are symptomatic of a government so busy being in charge that it forgets its job. Our Palos Hills elected officials should work to bring the community together, but neither of these instances makes progress in that regard.

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