En Route - A Visit to London

En route to the meeting in Bratisalva, my fiancee Patrice and I have stopped in London. On Thursday we had lunch with Kathryn Rossiter and Jon Benfield from the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers (SOLACE), the British City Manager association.

Kathryn is SOLACE's Director of Development and Operations and the long time contact for international affairs. I have gotten to know Kathryn over the last three years while I have served as the main ICMA member contact with SOLACE. I visited with her here in London two years ago and she came to the ICMA conference in Richmond last Fall. Jo joined SOLACE about that time to work on international issues for SOLACE.

"International" for SOLACE means a great focus on larger European local government issues. There is a European local government managers group that I will be writing more about from Bratislava. The centerpiece of SOLACE's international work recently has been their study of the impacts on local governments of human trafficking. SOLACE sponsored a study tour of their members to cities around Europe to identify best practices and then prepared a very complete report with recommendations (PDF).

SOLACE domestically has been helping their members respond to questions about the need for city managers and their high rates of pay (CMs are known here as Chief Executives). I brought along materials from ICMA to give some best practices that ICMA has developed to support the council-mamager plan in the US, including the work of the ICMA Fund for Professional Management.

SOLACE is one of the largest national city manager associations in the world with over 2,000 members. Their 2008 Annual Report is an excellent example of the depth of their work (PDF). While ICMA/SOLACE relations are strong today, I am still a big believer that more could be done to share training and best practices between the associations. Hopefully once the economy improves worldwide, there may be more partnership opportunities between the two associations.