This last hour was spent on how City Council evaluates its appointees.
First off, there are only four. This isn’t a broad discussion on city employees in general. They are the municipal judge, the city clerk, the city manager, and…one other that I’m forgetting. The important one here is the city manager.
Clearly there was friction between the former city manager, Bert Lumbreras, and city council. From the outside looking in, it’s kind of impossible to know what was going on. Was he being given monstrously large tasks, and insufficient staff or budget? Was he communicating this back and proactively helping to shape the tasks into things more do-able? Was he just ignoring requests that he didn’t like, and letting them fall by the wayside? The interim city manager, Stephanie Reyes, certainly seems smoother during the meetings, and less quick to tell the council why their idea is a nonstarter.
Anyway, performance evaluations are being altered to be outcomes-driven.
The debate hinged on one aspect of this: should the full staff-evaluation be included in the city council packet, easily visible for the entire city to see? Or should only a summary be included?
Max Baker was arguing that the entire evaluation should be in the packet. Since the entire evaluation is available under FOIA, he argued, let’s not paywall it. Let’s be transparent about why someone deserves a merit raise, so that constituents can see the basis for these decisions.
Mayor Hughson felt this was a terrible idea, for the employee’s sake. That it’s bad management for one employee to see another employee’s assessment. Mark Gleason’s concern was that it might shape how forthright councilmembers can be when they write their evaluation, if they know it will be going public.
I do think this is a tough call, and that both sides have merit. These are private citizens. There is a giant difference in visibility between putting a review behind a FOIA paywall and publishing it in the council packet.
I think I’m siding with Mayor Hughson and Mark Gleason. Extreme cases make bad policy. Egregious situations should be dealt with individually. (But if I’m reading between the lines, the other problem is that half the council phones it in and rubberstamps the evaluations, and so the evaluations don’t accurately reflect the things that were frustrating about the employee.)
However, the vote went the other way:
Shane Scott, Alyssa Garza, Max Baker, Saul Gonzalez – show the raw data of the whole evaluation
Jude Prather, Jane Hughson, Mark Gleason – Just the summary.
The San Marxist 