“I believe this commission will be remembered for caring about people, having a lof of compassion, and caring about the whole community.”
commissioners I have the privilege of serving with — I’m so excited about each and every one of them and what they bring to bear, and I really believe we will be effective policy makers and will do it with efficiency and thoroughness. And that’s the goal; you need to do both. You can run fast and be wrong, but you want to be sure you vet things well and then move on with what you know you need to do. Sometimes we need to make decisions because our resources are limited or we have some other type of constraints, and it’s not what we most would like to do, but it is the most necessary decision to make for the health of the city. And I think we have a commission well-equipped to accomplish that.” Mutz also has a great appreciation and respect for Police Chief Larry Giddens who he describes as “wonderfully transparent, honest, and practical,” and Fire Chief Douglas Riley who he describes as “a team-building-, care-about-his-people-, heart-forothers-and-the-Lord person.” Mutz’s biggest surprise during his first months in office has been how fast the days go with a calendar being fed by others. While he has always kept a full schedule and worked 10- to 12-hour days, he’s had to learn how to develop a cadence and balance now that lots of people from different arenas are filling his calendar. His goal is to be as available as possible while still having enough time to work on issues that are pressing. A great delight of his new role is working
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downtown. “I really love being downtown,” he says. “You can walk out the door and go to lunch. You can get to things so quickly; even if you have to drive, nothing’s very far away. That is great.” The Downtown Master Plan has become one of his high priorities, and Mutz is looking forward to working on that once the next Community Development Director is in place. With it, he hopes to look at how we can maximize use of the downtown footprint for the next decade. “We really are at a pivotal point in terms of the growth we are going to see. We are a city that can really celebrate its own uniqueness. We don’t have to be like Tampa. We don’t have to be like Orlando. We have to be a city that embraces creative talent, is an easy city for new startups to grow within, embraces technology, makes millennials at home, is as sophisticated as necessary, and as homey as possible.” While there have been no big surprises for Mutz in the area of policy, he has determined that the city needs to develop “the ability to do things more quickly. Because opportunities and windows that can be seized can be really short, we need to be really good at seizing those windows as quickly as possible, and I think we have an opportunity to improve our speed. I believe this commission will be remembered for caring about people, having a lot of compassion, and caring about the whole community.” One way he sees this coming into play is the One Lakeland Initiative which will develop “mentors across quadrants of our city to help young people have hope, dreams, and grow, and to find people who want to be involved in the process, because what we can do that is unique for a lot of cities is that this city cares about people. It is a philanthropic city. It’s a city that has a lot of people working together. That fertile ground could be multiplied into a set focus of initiatives that helps make us unified.” Mutz says this won’t necessarily be a City of Lakeland initiative other than getting it going and supporting it, but rather, “It will be a people’s initiative.” In addition to the One Lakeland Initiative and the Downtown Master Plan, another of Mutz’s priorities is the Road Diet in Dixieland. He is “very concerned with safety, and initially it won’t be popular, but it’s going to allow us to see how we can alter our traffic patterns in ways that really do become suitable. The combination of texting, narrowness, people on the sidewalk, and a growing Dixieland area has all the wrong formulas, and we’re living on borrowed time.” The movement of the monument in Munn Park is another priority. “I love what we have accomplished with the monument and want to see our veterans honored with the movement of it to an area where that’s accomplished, as well as for us to hear the hearts of the rest of the city that are bothered by its presence in Munn Park. To me, that is a picture of what we do when we think of everyone’s feelings, not