City manager to emphasize code enforcement

“We are working on making it look presentable,” he continued. “We are over-emphasizing the main arteries that come into Commerce.”

Overall, Pyrzenski said his focus since he was hired Oct. 8 has been to inspect every aspect of the city’s organization and processes for duplication, inefficiencies or shortcomings.

He found a shortcoming in the Commerce Police Department, one police chief John Gaissert has lived with for years.

“It was glaring that the uniformed patrol officers weren’t staffed to the level we need to be for a city of our size,” Pyrzenski explained. “We’ll be adding three uniformed patrol officers.”

Pryzenski was not quite ready to explain how he’ll manage that, but he said the tentative plan is to move one officer from the CID (Criminal Investigative Division).

“We’re looking at two positions that were frozen; we’re also going to be creative with the captain’s position,” he said, referring to Captain Steve Kelley.

Elsewhere, Pyrzenski has been paying attention to stumps left uncut, leaves in a position to block storm sewers and looking into every department for duplication, hoping to “align” them “with what the mayor and council want to accomplish.”

At City Hall, Pyrzenski is changing job classifications and seeking to clarify who reports to who, what the job functions are, how the functions in one department compare with those in another.

“We’ve got a lot of people doing their own things,” he said. “There are two or three little departments of one, two or three people doing their own thing” that may or may not fit with the “mission” of the city.

The city manager is looking over all purchase orders and requisitions, “challenging a lot of them to find out what is this.” The goal is to see if there are more efficient purchasing mechanisms and whether the city could realize savings by funneling purchases from various departments into one stream.

“We’ll hold our first real staff meeting after Thanksgiving,” he continued. “We’ll be talking about our policies and procedures and how we go about conducting our business, from simple things, like are we wearing seat belts, are we not on the cell phone while driving, are we putting our won signs up on the rights of way, to not looking presentable.”