Opinion: How to fix City Council’s evaluation process
Relative
to my last column on the flaws in the site review process,
on Wednesday the Camera covered the Boulder City Council’s
“workshopping” of a ballot item to extend the current capital improvements tax.
This tax funded, for example, the rebuilding of the civic center area between
city hall and the library. What caught my eye was a failed attempt by council
members Bob Yates, Jan Burton (who is running for re-election), and Andrew
Shoemaker to remove $2 million of the funds targeted for replacing Fire Station
No. 3 at Arapahoe and 30th, and instead spend the citizens’ tax money to make
operational the “arts cinema” that the developer of the Pearl West building
promised during site review, but allegedly does not now have the funds to
complete. This hole in the site review process has been known about for years,
so why hasn’t it been fixed?
So it’s clear, Station No. 3 is
undersized to cover all the growth in east Boulder, and is too close to the
Boulder Creek floodway. But the need for over $12 million in additional funds
shows that Boulder’s development impact fees are way too low.
Also discussed at that City
Council meeting was the council’s evaluation of their employees — the city
manager, the city attorney, and the municipal judge. The information provided
was so general that it is literally impossible to identify what particular
actions were evaluated, or what the council members thought about them. Worse,
the manager received a “strongly exceeds standards” rating, and the attorney
got “exceeds standards,” but “standard” is nowhere defined. So this whole
process is a classic black box, and lacks even an attempt at transparency.
For example, last fall during the
dispute over the petitions for the three-term limit initiative, it became clear
that the city was using the wrong laws to approve the form of the petitions,
and the same person who gave this approval conducted the hearing reviewing this
approval, creating an obvious conflict of interest. Did these failures enter
into the manager and attorney’s evaluation? There’s no way to know. Or, in the
process of approving the 1440 Pine project for homeless youth, it was
discovered that the deal was “cooked” before it ever went public because of the
grant approval process, and then, to make the project happen, the city’s
land-use regulations had to be stretched beyond anything reasonable. Did the
manager and attorney lose points over these?What about the really poorly
designed process to deal with the possible annexation of CU South, where
citizens had to beat their brains out for months just to get the city to take
seriously that there were significant limitations on how much of the site
should be developed, how the flood planning, transportation, and housing needs
should be addressed, etc.? Will this ever receive a serious evaluation?
In fact, there was nothing of
substance in the report that would justify the salary increases that were
awarded. At least in publicly held companies, the boards of directors attempt
to excuse the huge salaries they grant to their CEOs. Here, these increases are
based solely on what the council members said in private, which we’ll never
know.
The city needs to start doing
public “what worked and what didn’t” evaluations on every major project. In
these evaluations, the council would both give and get real-time specific
feedback to create some objective agreement about what was done well and what
wasn’t. Done right, this would both clarify and depersonalize any mistakes, and
so would allow the city staff to really improve performance rather than just
defend themselves.
These evaluations should include
council members, board members, and, most importantly, the citizens that were
significantly involved. Everyone would list what they saw that worked or
didn’t. A third party would summarize the comments, reducing them to relatively
brief anonymous sentences, and then re-circulate these items to get input from
the people who didn’t comment on particular ones. The results would then be
tallied and made public, so everyone could see what the conclusions were and
what agreement existed around each item.
To me, this transparent approach
provides a much more detailed, objective, and substantial basis for evaluating
performance, acknowledging what’s working, and fixing what’s broken. It also
provides the citizens with some hard evidence that they have been heard and
that the council is aware of any problems. And the city manager and attorney
won’t have to keep acting like no one ever made a mistake, and can just focus
on doing things better.