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.


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