Opinion: Policy projects in Boulder


Here we are starting 2018. We have a highly educated and engaged citizenry, a smart City Council, and a hard-working city staff. Yet any number of people I know are worried about the next city project that will likely go awry and leave them, once again, feeling disenfranchised and stuck with a result that they know is far from optimal. Why are we still struggling with this sort of systemic failure? What is the missing piece?
The city manager is responsible for the city’s operations and budget, and the city attorney is responsible for writing and enforcing the laws. But in Boulder we also spend a huge amount of time and energy pursuing new paths, dealing with new problems and opportunities, and attempting to be on the cutting edge in many areas at once. However, managing these types of activities is not really anyone’s primary responsibility, nor has there been any focused effort to consider what is required to do so successfully. The Public Participation Working Group touched on this in asking that citizens be involved early in projects, and that projects have good “purpose statements.” But these are only two parts of a much more complex process, and not just formalities to be checked off.
This type of policy project work (p/p) requires both skills and levels of responsibility well beyond what is needed for ordinary day-to-day business. So it’s clear, “policy” and “project”are two sides of the same effort: The policy side involves objectively articulating the purpose of the project, and then laying out its goals, objectives, options, analyses (including externalities), data needs, etc. The project side involves organizing this work, managing ongoing interactions between decision-makers, staff, and citizens, setting appropriate timelines, and revising all the above on the fly when it becomes clear that what is being done needs fixing. The end result, if done properly, is a product that has been efficiently and impartially developed and is ready to be debated and decided. It’s obvious when this process has worked — even those who didn’t get exactly what they wanted are satisfied that they got a fair shake.
This p/p work requires an academic level of study of policy creation and analysis, experience in managing projects so as to know how to sequence the work, awareness to know when feedback loops need to be introduced to keep things on track, skill at working in a holistic, non-linear fashion, and willingness to change direction when necessary.
The election law project is a perfect opportunity to work on this p/p approach. This project includes both fixing recent mistakes in changes to the city code and Charter, and dealing with new challenges, such as bringing “dark money” out into the light, revising the initiative process to deal with new realities (e.g. the number of registered voters, on which the number of signatures needed is based, is no longer meaningful), and cleaning up the campaign finance reporting requirements. The good news is that the council seems pretty clear on the direction it wants to go. But the devil is in the details, like knowing exactly how far to push the case law to keep the disclosure requirements constitutional while maximizing transparency. And each of these many details needs to be handled responsibly.
The Accessory Dwelling Unit discussion needs some real p/p work, because it has the potential to go off the rails at this point. For example, in the purpose statement, “diversity of housing types” is way too vague to provide clear direction; teepees and igloos are not really appropriate for our variable climate. Inputs from meetings where a large fraction of the attendees already have ADUs, or from web comments that aren’t corrected for response bias (who bothered to reply) or demographics (are they owners or renters, neighborhood residents or not, etc.) are not very useful. A more appropriate approach might be to do door-to-door surveys in areas where ADUs are being considered to get complete data inputs from all homeowners. Unbiased economic analysis is needed: A new ADU may benefit the current owner (because they didn’t pay for that right when they bought), but the next owner will pay more for that extra unit, making their housing less affordable. A map of complaints about over-occupancy, noise, etc. would illuminate where problems already exist.
The council and city staff should put some focus on implementing this type of p/p work at their retreat. It will make everyone’s efforts — council, staff, and citizens alike — more efficient, productive, and satisfying.


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