Accepting criticism can help improve results, Howard County executive says

For county elected officials, the margin for error is small.

The electorate will decide just how much slack to cut when it comes to professional judgement and policy decisions, and those decisions come every four years. But there’s a faster ecosystem that defines an administration, for better or worse, and it’s built on the far murkier foundation of public sentiment. But the lessons can be direct.

“You’re not allowed to have a bad day,” said Calvin Ball, Howard County, Md.’s second-term executive. “We can’t cuss someone out in anger, or get upset with a waiter if we get the wrong order or the food is cold. Those are things you shouldn’t do anyway, but we definitely can’t do.”

Then there’s the criticism. Ball calls them “The Howard Hundred,” the people who always have something to say, some kind of criticism regardless of its relevance to a policy or the care with which it was crafted. As a public servant, he always wants to hear how the county can do a better job or craft better policy.

“We call them the Howard Hundred, but Howard County has 350,000 residents,” he said. “Having anywhere from 50-100 people who are never happy, that’s just statistically going to happen, no matter where you are. You can’t win them all, as hard as you try.”

Few candidates earn 100% of the vote, so perfection is an unreasonable standard. 

“At any point, there’s 29%-49% of the population that didn’t support us for whatever reason.” 

What if these residents are the canaries in the coal mine that are tipping the county off to something wrong?

“You can acknowledge that maybe there are things that we can do better, maybe there is some validity to the concerns, or we need to communicate better,” Ball said. “Maybe there’s a nugget of truth to the criticism and so I look inward and then to that point, try to communicate even more effectively and be transparent. 

“I used to tell a lot of young elected officials, if you’re not able to deliver the product that people want, you have to at least deliver the process. Allow them extra hearings, be transparent, talk about how we got to the decision, the data inputs that we use and then talk about the data. If people are saying, ‘you’re not funding education enough,’ ‘you’re not funding public safety enough,’ ‘you’re doing nothing for the environment,’ talk about the longitudinal data about the investments and the progress that you’ve made.”

Howard County has dealt with repeated floods and Ball found that addressing those infrastructure liabilities was as much about selling the solution as it was engineering one.

“We can explain our commitment to flood mitigation by telling people that our retention ponds hold about 13 million gallons of water during severe storms, but we make that accessible to people by showing that that’s equivalent to a football field filled with water that’s 30 feet deep,” he said.

Through it all, Ball advises acknowledging one’s own humanity and not losing sight of that in the effort to meet the moment.

“It’s important to keep in mind that as elected officials, we want to do a good job, we are good people and we have feelings, too,” he said.