Opinion: Restoring public participation in Boulder’s government
The Boulder City Council
is setting up a working group to improve how the “public” participates in its
governance. This will be a big undertaking, since the process is flawed from
top to bottom.
At the highest level, the
lack of trust is evident. Citizens are asking, “Do the council and staff really
work for us the citizens, or are they in it for themselves? Do they really
value what we care about, or do they hold their personal goals and interests
paramount?” This should not be an “either/or,” but the current unacknowledged tension
makes many citizens feel irrelevant, whether they are testifying at a council
meeting, or are invited to participate in a staff-managed process.
I certainly have
experienced this myself. There is an almost total lack of feedback when
testifying at council or emailing the council on substantive issues. And even
as an appointee to the city’s working group on impact fees (an area where I’m a
relative expert), when I identified significant flaws in the staff work, my
observations were simply ignored. For example, I pointed out that certain land
costs were not included in the fee calculations, even though they should have
been according to standard practice and the consultant’s own “buy-in”
methodology. But my comments were disregarded; I may as well have not been
there. Also ignored were serious flaws in transportation fee calculations and
in the legal basis for the proposed jobs-housing linkage fees.
The public participation
process failure sometimes starts with flawed goal setting, like with the
Housing Boulder project. Some of the original goals, rubber stamped by the
council, were completely unrealistic, such as having a variety of housing types
in every part of the city, or making every part of every neighborhood a
15-minute walk to open space, shopping, etc. Even though these two would have
required a redesign of much of the city, they quickly became fixed in stone.
This meant that citizens’ comments were constrained so as not to threaten these
poorly conceived notions, making many people feel like the outreach meetings
were just for show.
People get very frustrated
when the city doesn’t acknowledge its mistakes. For example, the city said
vehicle travel times on city arterial streets haven’t increased over the last
decades. But then a citizen observed in the Camera that in 2004 the staff
stopped recording travel times when there was street maintenance, etc., so that
the times before and after that date are not comparable. But the city never
acknowledged this misrepresentation. The same thing happened with the staff’s
accident forecast analysis for the Folsom “rightsizing;” it was buried until
after the debate, and no one acknowledged this failure.
The problems range from
the obvious to the esoteric. On Saturday, the Camera carried a story about a
city tour of existing and potential sites for the “homeless.” It is glaringly
obvious that this is a big issue in Boulder, and especially concerning for
those who might end up being neighbors to these new facilities. But instead of
arranging a second or third bus for those members of the public who wanted to
attend, the city dissuaded them from “tagging along” — hardly an effective way
to encourage participation.
On the esoteric side, I
have pointed out, to no effect, a number of flawed staff legal analyses
associated with election laws. These range from staff’s misreading the state
law regarding the title setting process for 300/301 last year, to removing a
section of Boulder’s code that previously prevented city contractors from
contributing to council candidates’ campaigns; even federal law prohibits such
contributions for congressional elections, because of the obvious potential for
graft.
The council’s attempt to
legalize “rental co-ops” has lacked any structured public process. As a result,
essential questions have not been answered, such as how many illegal co-ops
there are; the extent to which they are merely conveniences for relatively
well-off people with itinerant lifestyles versus a real help for the less
economically fortunate; what the resident count and turnover rate is; what
quality of neighbors they are; where they could be located without major
impacts; what the market for new ones is; etc.
When such problems and
concerns are ignored after citizens have attempted to raise them, people
reasonably conclude that the city is more interested in appearances than real
feedback. So I suggest that a good start for this process would be to apply the
“three up” rule that I used when I was on the council: When you screw up, own
up and then clean it up.