Right on time

Back in the day, one of my public policy professors opined that a new supervisor's window of opportunity for making significant organizational changes was 90 days. Try to do too much earlier than than, and you risked alienating the people who were going to be implementing your ideas because they would think you didn't know enough about how things really got done. Wait much longer than that, and people would think you didn't care or have any ideas worth carrying out.

Just three months into the job, City Manager Tom Bonfield is putting his brand on Durham.

On Thursday, Bonfield unveiled a reorganization of the city's administration to "promote departments working together."

Bonfield's plan aligns the city's 23 departments into three "teams" or "theme areas," each under a deputy city manager charged with "facilitating" inter-department cooperation.

"It isn't about controlling anything," it's about facilitating," he said.

I'm sure i'll have some uninformed and completely spurious opinion about the significance of these developments soon.