Opinion: Boulder’s city legal work and “ad hominem” attacks

 A few days ago, I was watching the video of the Dec. 15 City Council meeting to find out what happened with the ordinance addressing on-line and other petitioning matters. I heard a number of council members complaining bitterly about “ad hominem” attacks, presumably related to comments made by citizens about the performance of the city attorney.

As a former council member, I can understand their upsets. But what seems to be missing is any acknowledgement of the existence of some serious underlying problems.

Just for example, relative to this ordinance, I had sent in some obvious corrections to the ordinance. It was missing the 180-day limit on signature gathering, and it continued the city’s self-created exemption from state requirements for petition formats, which leaves the city without complete legal standards. But nothing was fixed.

This is far from the first time I’ve taken on mistakes that never should have happened. For example, in the recent election, the council put on the ballot an extension of the utility occupation tax to fund energy related items. City officials initially planned to not put “for and against” statements in the county’s “Blue Book,” even thought the state Constitution requires that.

I pointed that out, but it took days for this situation to be acknowledged and statements obtained. Then the city’s plan was to attach names to the statements. So I also researched that, and pointed out that the state Constitution forbids including names, so they were dropped.

Earlier, I spent considerable time pointing out mistakes in some of the ballot initiatives, like the “free attorneys for renters” that tried to call the $75 charge on landlords a fee, when it was clearly a tax, or the “direct election of the mayor” initiative that failed to properly count the number of council seats, so we would have ended up with eight, not nine.

Both of these problems got fixed in the last minute negotiations with the petitioners. But if the legal review had been done properly in the first place, these and others would have been caught early and pointed out.

Then there was this year’s huge blowup about the number of signatures required for petitions and when they were due. All of this occurred because of some completely unfounded assertions that Boulder was somehow exempt from state laws regulating charter amendment petitions.

I had to review our charter, other cities’ charters, the state Constitution and laws, and contact other cities and the state Office of Legislative Legal Services, and then make the arguments multiple times to even get the council to pay attention and finally reverse course. And still the city stopped the petitioners working on the CU South petition from gathering signatures when they were perfectly within their rights to do so up to the Aug. 5 deadline.

And prior to that, there was the multi-year process to fix the damage done by 2017 Ballot Measure 2Q, which was claimed to be a “clean up” measure, but would have potentially created chaos in the petitioning process. When I wrote a column exposing its problems, the council remained silent.

Only after the election did the council acknowledge the problems, and organized a working group to fix things. And there were numerous other legal missteps, especially with municipalization.

I’ve now been involved in city politics for almost 40 years. I spent 1985-1993 and 1995-1997 on the council. And I don’t remember ever seeing the level of inadequate work as I have seen in this last decade.

In my humble opinion, there were five reasons the councils I served on didn’t have these problems: First, we had an outstanding city attorney, who both gave us excellent legal advice and helped point out political pitfalls. Second, we were very direct with both praise and criticism of city staff’s work. A high-level staff member told me, after both of us were no longer involved, that it was “terrifying to come to council if you weren’t prepared.” But he also said the frank feedback was really beneficial, because it kept the work quality very high.

Third, our council agenda committee, unlike now, very carefully reviewed all the material, and sent items back if they weren’t 100% ready.  Fourth, we invited knowledgeable citizens to testify, and then questioned them. That way, we received informed, independent feedback on the agenda items. And fifth, we learned to minimize speeches, and instead argued things out without holding back or feigning politeness. So issues were identified, confronted head on, and actually resolved most of the time.

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