Opinion: The City Council ‘force field’


No, this is not a discussion about physics. But it is about a real phenomenon, even if it takes place inside people’s heads. Sitting up behind the council desk in the Boulder City Council chambers can be very disorienting. It’s really easy to start feeling like the council is the center of the universe, and the people in the audience are somewhat unreal, like actors on a movie screen. What’s real are only your own thoughts and opinions. The danger occurs when this is not noticed, or when it just becomes easier to ignore that pesky reality outside the force field.
It can sometimes require a conscious effort to break out of this shell and re-connect what you are doing with the outside world. You need to keep reminding yourself that you are there to serve the citizens in the audience and the rest who didn’t come to the council meeting that evening. It’s not about you, but about them.
I attended the Boulder council meeting on Tuesday night to offer some comments on the potential ballot issues, and saw both aspects of this phenomenon at work. The biggest issue at hand was whether and in what form to put a tax on the ballot to replace the 25-cent Parks and Recreation sales tax that expires in 2015. The disagreement revolved around whether this tax should be “dedicated” to P&R, or left undedicated so that the revenues could be allocated wherever desired.
The unreality is that the tax revenue stream is only a fraction of the money that goes to P&R. So un-dedicating the tax revenue makes no practical difference in the city’s ability to move money around; P&R will always get more money than the funds generated by this tax anyway. But it does make a difference in how people vote: Dedicated taxes, especially those with expiration dates, give the citizens reassurance that the council will not just divert the money to other uses. So the solution is obvious — dedicate and set a sunset date, have the P&R board put together the details of how the money is to be spent, and then go to the voters with something specific. But the debate was inside force field, and so was inconclusive.
The discussion about the evaluation process for the city manager, city attorney and municipal judge was better, at least in terms of the results. The majority of council decided to course-correct for next year and hire an independent outside consultant to collect and collate the material, so that people providing feedback are assured that their input will be kept confidential. This is obviously critical for city department heads, etc., who could be subject to retribution.
The unsatisfactory part was that it took one council member making a big stink about the current process to get action. (This year’s process, decided by two council members, was to use city staff to hold the evaluation responses, an obvious conflict of interest. But apparently some council members are still too far inside the force field to see this.)
There was a great moment when a citizen at the microphone asked, “What would Jefferson say?” about a proposed ordinance that would restrict where people could gather to protest, an obvious First Amendment concern. One council member then took up the issue and said that he was ready to “kill” the proposed restriction when it came back. That was great, but I was disappointed that the council didn’t proactively ask that a motion be prepared to abandon the ordinance so that citizens aren’t left worrying.
The discussion about using negotiated, rather than competitive, bond sales actually focused quite quickly on the real issue — using these bonds to finance a possible municipal electric utility. Almost no time was spent discussing useless abstractions. And the council decided, realistically, that the time was not ripe — the “muni” is still a ways from being ready for financing.
But unfortunately unreality persisted with respect to the Pro Cycling Challenge bike race. The contract was finally made public last Friday. There were a large number of surprises, including a three-year commitment to the current race promoters, and attempts to restrict what city officials say. But so far, most of the council members have been immune to any input, and have meekly accepted whatever they have been handed.


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