Opinion: Before we pay them more, let’s make sure the City Council is working efficiently

Some of the current Boulder City Council are considering asking the citizens to increase the council’s pay. To me the real issue is whether the council’s performance is up to snuff. If it is not, then paying people more money to perform the same way seems rather foolish. In my opinion, it would be far better for the council members to first work on improving their performance. Having served when meetings ran to all hours with zero pay, and council members (other than the mayor) only putting in around 20 to 25 hours per week, I know it can be done more efficiently.

This brings me to the unprecedented spate of formal complaints that have been recently filed against various council members, including at least one against the whole council, for violations of the city code, charter, etc. Why do Boulder citizens feel the need to take such serious actions? Maybe they think that council members won’t pay attention otherwise.

Interestingly, many of these complaints were about the Police Oversight Panel. No surprise, since having a staff monitor plus the panel (that bizarrely picks its own candidates for membership, with closed-door discussions) seems like a setup for conflicts.

Another issue is the lack of citizen involvement in important city processes. For example, according to a Hotline from one council member, the question of increasing council pay was discussed by two sitting council members with a group of ten former council members. But the non-invited former council members were not even informed, and the names of the ten have not been made public, as far as I know. What criteria were used in their selection?

The bias concerns also relate to the many informal complaints about the city’s “push poll” on occupancy limits. Apparently, the proposal to allow five unrelated people per housing unit is moving forward, but without unbiased data, ongoing citizen input or in-depth discussion of the pros, cons and alternatives.

Then there were the closed-door negotiations between two council members with Xcel/Public Service over the franchise, and the 23 closed-door meetings between two council members and CU over the annexation of CU South, in apparent violation of the state open meeting law. These certainly deserved a court hearing. And the results clearly could have been improved with up-front citizen involvement, in my opinion.

The conduct of City Council meetings is another item of concern. In the past, citizen participation was an important part of the meeting. It was the chance for citizens to speak directly to council members. On topics of particular interest, interchanges occurred between the citizens and council members, which many times illuminated both, and so helped define the proper path forward. Knowledgeable people were specifically invited to testify, and then questioned, so the council could learn what they knew. (It was my experience that almost always there were people in the audience who knew more than we on council did.)

But now, “citizen participation” appears to be a mere formality, with strict limits on both the number of speakers and the time allowed. It’s as if the citizens are just an irritant, at least to many council members, with their opinions not really altering the pre-determined direction.

As to the workload, which is apparently a big problem for some council members, it’s my observation that much of this is a result of poor meeting preparation. Clearly, many times there is a lot more information that could be relevant to a given issue than anyone realistically has the time to absorb. So, the critical element of the process is assembling the material in a way that the relevant material is accessible, and the critical questions addressed, but without biasing the outcome.

This is nothing new; it’s exactly the problem that we faced when I got on the council. The key piece we added was the Council Agenda Committee. Its job was threefold: 1) to make sure that the material answered the questions that council members might have without burying them in extraneous data, 2) to organize the potential actions so that if the council endorsed a particular direction, it would actually get the job done while minimizing unwanted side effects, and 3) to invite knowledgeable citizens to testify and answer questions so that we would have the benefit of their wisdom. In my observation, the current CAC does none of these very well (or sometimes at all).

There’s lots more to be said about improving the council processes. So, before deciding to ask for more money, council members need to fix what’s not working.

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