I return from vacation to find Vancouver city manager Penny Ballem decidedly unrepentant in the face of an exempt (or non-union) staff association memo leaked this week. It details the fear and loathing Ballem has managed to engender among a fair whack of the city’s 700 managers and professionals on the city payroll.

Throughout the 15-page survey of staff attitudes, the majority express the view that city hall is no longer a place where they are respected and where there was once an “important line between administration and politics.”

“I get it,” Ballem says.

And here’s what she gets. “When you have a bureaucracy which served one party over the majority of their lifetime, a new government may be difficult to adjust to.”

Clearly that is at the heart of the friction. But so is Ballem’s leadership style.

Those who have adjusted say she is smart, supportive, impartial and straightforward.

But many among the group of exempt staff have been bitching ever since former city manager Judy Rodgers was given the toss by Gregor Robertson and his crew moments after they took office a year and a half ago. With Ballem and an “activist” council in charge, they knew their world was about to change.

Ballem’s reputation preceded her. And not just because of her hot temper. “Penny is a screamer,” a colleague from her days as a deputy minister in Victoria recalls. She also drives hard—not just herself but everyone around her.

That is certainly part of the problem. While there is reason to applaud the direction she is moving in, one could argue she is going faster than the organization can handle.

And here is another cause for complaint: she is a notorious micromanager. Worse, a “nano-manager,” one underling quipped.

Bureaucrats who were used to writing reports to council and having them land on councillors’ desks unedited now find their work gone through in detail and turned back to be worked on by Ballem. She admits the effect this has: staffers “say that’s disrespectful, that they are professionals. But I say I’m responsible when I sign off on a report. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” She realizes her management approach “is clearly a shift for them.” But she makes it perfectly clear. “That is not going to change. So get over it.”

She had a pile of work laid at her feet from day one. There was the Olympic Village, which is still having difficulties because of the soft real estate market. Then there were the actual Games.

If that wasn’t enough, there’s last year’s budget saddled with a generous wage increase to win labour peace for the Olympics, a tax transfer from commercial to residential and rapidly falling development revenues thanks to a crashing economy, which all made things more than a bit tricky. She says staff was “surprised” when they were told we couldn’t just raise taxes.

Part of her solution, which she staunchly supports—“I would go to the wall on that”—was a services review and a massive centralization of a government that became spread out over the years. The grumpiness from that exercise was only exacerbated by a decision to hold back a portion of the raise coming to the exempt staff on the city payroll. And that is something else she gets. If she admits to doing anything wrong, it is how she handled that hold-back. She now says she should have explained it better.

But that is as far as she goes before she heads into another contemptuous accounting of what she is in the midst of fixing from the system she inherited.

While it may sound repugnant to some, I find it refreshing when she insists it’s the role of the public service to deliver council’s political agenda in a responsible and efficient fashion. “If people think that’s mean or disrespectful” she says, “bring it on.”

And you can bet council’s Vision majority is cheering from the sidelines—so far.

agarr@vancourier.com