Salogga takes over at Carson City Senior Center

Carson City is shuffling staff to deal with growing demand for senior services.

Michael Salogga, the city’s business resource manager, is taking over as business manager at the Carson City Senior Center.

He fills a spot recently vacated by Dawn Beck, who now works in the Sheriff’s Office.

“It presented an opportunity for me to put in Michael,” said Nick Marano, city manager. “Michael is an MBA and we need to get the center on sustainable footing.”

Marano said the center is funded by 5 cents of the property tax, which isn’t keeping pace with the growth in services.

Meals on Wheels, for example, the program which delivers food to seniors at home, is expected to deliver 79,196 meals from October 2016 to September 2017.

That’s about a 9 percent increase from the same period in 2016 and a 35 percent jump from 2013.

The center’s lunch service has expanded, too, with the number of meals served up about 7 percent since 2013.

Transportation, or one-way rides, is projected to increase 60 percent this year while hours of client service, or case management, is expected to jump 34 percent.

Salogga will leave behind a variety of duties that will be divvied up inside city hall.

“He’s a Swiss Army knife for me. I’ve used him in a lot of different functions,” said Marano.

One is business mentoring through the Adams Hub and Entrepreneur Network at Carson High School.

Small businesses Salogga counseled in the past are being referred to the Nevada Small Business Development Center’s Reno office at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Salogga and Marano worked together on economic development so much of that will be taken over by the city manager.

“There’s not a lot he was doing that I wasn’t already aware of or already involved in,” Marano said.

Marano will also prepare for outside presentations, such as to the Nevada Legislature, something Salogga assisted with.

A big city project Salogga had taken on was planning the move to performance-based budgeting.

He said at the end of last year he would be meeting throughout the year with each department to review programs.

That task will be assumed sooner rather later by Nancy Paulson, chief financial officer.

“I’m giving that to Nancy earlier than I thought,” Marano said. “I’ll wait until the budget is done to set deliverables on that.”

Salogga was also collecting department performance metrics and will finish up doing that with public works and public safety departments before moving to the senior center.

And he was the champion, Marano said, of continuous process improvement.

The process is typified by so-called kaizen events in which departments meet to determine ways to work more efficiently.

Now, Marano plans to have staff from each department go through a 20-hour training to become so-called green belts in the process so the city can continue to use it.

“Every department needs its own champion,” he said.