Opinion: A fresh start for Boulder’s city management

Boulder has one of the most educated citizenries of any city in the U.S., and Boulder citizens are very knowledgeable and strongly engaged in the issues that affect our future.

Unfortunately, many citizens have lost trust in the city’s processes. Our City Council should take advantage of the recent retirement of City Manager Jane Brautigam to resolve many longstanding issues so that our city government works better for Boulder citizens.

The next city manager must have the ability and interest to successfully manage “policy projects” – those efforts that address the significant issues and opportunities in such difficult areas as: flood planning; the new Xcel franchise and getting to a clean energy future; and growth issues, including jobs/population balance, affordable housing, transportation planning that actually reduces congestion, and keeping Boulder livable.

For policy projects to succeed, the manager must ensure that citizens are involved early and often. That includes using their experience and skills, and including their values and desires. The ultimate test is that the citizens are both satisfied with the process, and accept and/or support the outcome because their expertise was respected and their values considered.

The manager cannot do what is needed all on her/his own. No one has the time or brain capacity to do the day-to-day personnel management, budgetary analysis, operations supervision, etc. and still handle the details of the many important policy projects that come up.

So to manage the policy projects part of the job, the manager should have a deputy manager who has (1) strong policy analysis skills, (2) openness to successfully involve citizens in the actual development of policy (not just do glorified polling as frequently happens), (3) personal qualities that will generate citizens’ respect, and (4) the clout to get departments that normally operate as “silos” to work together.

Additionally, in order to make all this work, a key element is that the manager must have the strength of character to push back when it appears that the council is missing or avoiding difficult aspects of particular issues, or appears to be making premature decisions “just to get things done.”

Invariably, policy projects work better if the goals are carefully thought through, a full range of approaches developed, the necessary detailed analyses performed, and the implications fully discussed with those citizens who are impacted, even if it might take more time.

Having a manager who tries to guess what the council majority wants, or is willing to do sub-par work just to get things off their plate, is a prescription for failure. We don’t want, and the council doesn’t need a manager who just goes along to avoid creating waves. This invariably just leads to more work.

Related to the above, the council needs to take a serious look at two of their systems – the council agenda committee and the council committee that reviews the performance of the manager, the city attorney, and the municipal judge.

The CAC’s functioning now is nowhere near as effective as it was when it was started back in the 1980s. Material for council meetings frequently needs far more vetting than it gets.

This inadequate preparation forces the council to hear issues multiple times, hugely increasing its workload. So there needs to be a real feedback loop between the CAC and the project manager, so that problems get fixed before the council as a whole takes items up. And frequent performance reviews are necessary, so problems don’t fester.

A dimension not normally considered in project management is the legal support. But although good legal work may not make a policy project succeed, poor work can lead to real problems, which invariably compound if early mistakes are not corrected.

According to the charter, the council hires a city attorney to “be the legal advisor of the council and of all other city officials and of all boards and commissions.” Underlying this brief description is the absolute requirement that the city attorney’s office provides accurate information on the laws that govern city actions.

A good example is the clean energy effort. Both municipalization and the Xcel franchise involve legal, economic, and technical aspects. The halting progress shows how important legal work can be.

Another example is the review of citizen-initiated ballot measures. Many times, like with this year’s ballot measures, the legal aspects are critical, as the council found out when they had to perform multiple modifications at the last moment.

The council should not let his opportunity go to waste. Make the changes we need!

 

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