Four months into his new gig, Durham city manager Bo Ferguson is shaking things up inside City Hall.
Last Thursday, Ferguson released an internal memo announcing changes to the city’s organizational structure. Most of the reorganization realigns departments under the purview of a different deputy city manager, and brings together employees from different agencies who already frequently coordinate with each other.
“It’s all about how we do our work every day,” Ferguson tells the INDY. “Some of this right now is still conceptual, and some of the new departments, especially their identity, will develop over time. But I think the executive team is pretty excited.”
The current organizational chart divides up a majority of departments amongst three deputy city managers who oversee three divisions: community building, operations, and public safety. The new divisions can loosely be described as public safety, operations, and infrastructure.
Nearly every department is affected by the reshuffling of city staff. Some agencies are being dissolved with their component parts being reabsorbed by other departments. Others will report to new directors, and possibly a new deputy city manager, even if their department remains mostly intact. That said, no layoffs have been announced as part of the process.
“Things in Durham are constantly changing,” Ferguson says. “Council priorities and council members are changing, and so I think it’s incumbent to pretty regularly step back and ask, ‘how can we do things better?’”
Ferguson has been with the city of Durham for over a decade, and carries with him up-close experience with the city’s operations that few others can boast. He joined the city of Durham staff as a deputy manager in 2013. At the time of his promotion last December, Mayor Leonardo Williams said that Ferguson would bring “fresh ideas” to the position.
After his new position became official, Ferguson got to work bringing together the deputy city managers and other folks on the executive team to brainstorm how to revamp the city’s organizational chart.
“There was no one driving problem or concern,” Ferguson says, “but having been here for 12 years and seen under the hood for a while, I had some ideas and heard lots of feedback from within the organization about what’s working and where things could be improved.”
By March, the team had a proposal which Ferguson announced internally to staff last week.
“It’s still a work in progress,” Ferguson says. “I don’t think we’re going to see more changes, but there’s still a lot of details to work out.”
Perhaps the biggest changes are being made in the public safety division.
Under the reorganization plan, two departments are being reassigned to the public safety division: Parks and Recreation, and the Office of Economic Development. Williams and others on the city council have been outspoken about drawing connections between recreation, economic opportunity and public safety, and how the outcomes of the first two—especially for children and young adults—impact the third. It’s a division Ferguson knows well; he presided over the city’s public safety apparatus as deputy city manager before his promotion in December (that position remains vacant as of now).
Changes to some departments follow a natural evolution for how the city tackles broader challenges.
Homelessness Services will now be housed under Community Safety alongside HEART, due in part to the way the HEART team has evolved over the years to handle more street outreach. As an example of the overlap: At a December work session last year, city council and staff deliberated for an hour about whether the HEART team should hand out tents to residents experiencing homelessness, a process that dovetails with Homelessness Services, currently under Community Development and a different deputy city manager than Community Safety. The lack of clarity around who is in charge of important services can leave some residents out in the cold.
“An important thing is who’s going to take the lead on figuring something out,” city council member Nate Baker tells the INDY. “There might be parts of this reorganization where there’s an opportunity at this time, under certain leadership, to accomplish a goal, and that changes down the line.”
Another big adjustment is housing all of the infrastructure-related departments under one roof. Transportation, Planning, and Inspections will join General Services, Water Management, and other departments that shape the physical environment. Under the current system, departments that are in charge of designing Durham’s physical infrastructure, like Transportation and Planning, are overseen by a different deputy city manager than General Services and Public Works, which are responsible for implementing those designs.
Folks in the development community say the review process suffers from a similarly disjointed workflow. People presenting at city council or planning commission meetings, from for-profit developers to local organizations like Durham Community Land Trustees, have vocalized their frustration with the arduous development review process that includes a web of staff from different departments. Now, staff in charge of development review from transportation and stormwater will be folded into the Planning Department.
In practice, these new changes streamline the workflow for staff, Ferguson says, making it easier for one manager to align and coordinate tasks, but also benefit folks who regularly work with city staff.
In this political climate, a large-scale city reorganization might invoke allusions to DOGE, the quasi-governmental agency led by Elon Musk that is responsible for massive cuts to governmental agencies and funding for nonprofits. Rest assured, mass layoffs are not a condition of this process. But councilman Baker and others still find value in scrutinizing the way things are done inside City Hall, barring the right motivations.
“We need to have tough and honest conversations about a lot of different things,” Baker says. “But if the manager of that conversation is driven by profit and not driven by a passion for the public good, you’re never going to have an honest conversation.”
The new system will take effect on July 1, after the city council approves the next fiscal year budget.
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