Opinion: City Council doesn’t like citizens complaining to the staff, but refuses to listen

Earlier this week, Boulder council members Matt Benjamin and Tina Marquis published a lengthy complaint accusing citizens of verbally abusing city staff. They told people to, instead, communicate their concerns directly to the council by showing up at public hearings or emailing them.

The problem is that, based on the visible evidence, this council majority pays essentially no attention to anything anyone says. If they really wanted people to come to the council meetings or write to them with their concerns, then they need to demonstrate that they actually care by responding with useful action.

A start would be to allow testimony from all the people who sign up, not just a random selection. Council members should ask questions right away and not wait until the end of the meeting. Tell them what the city can do for them. If things get repetitive, the mayor can always tell people to sit down.

This sounds like it could take a lot of time. But, based on my 10 years on council, once people know they will be heard and something will happen, the number of people who show up on a given issue will go way down.

The council also needs to ensure that its processes allow public participation when required by law. For example, the “straw poll” on the airport’s future, taken at a study session, was seemingly a violation of the city charter, which requires a hearing and vote on a motion during a real council meeting. (By the way, when I sent them the charter language on how council decisions must be made, I got no response.)

Citizen distrust was already low on the airport issue because the staff’s work was inadequate to fully evaluate all the options. Making this decision in an inappropriate manner just made things worse. 

On the issue of biased or missing staff work, the council has de facto encouraged this by not evaluating and correcting the processes, material and analyses that the staff produces prior to the meetings. This function has been completely abandoned. Staff work now shows up without outside review. The result is that the citizens feel ill-informed and thus disenfranchised. And since communications to the council have no effect, their anger ends up being expressed at the staff.

The Comp Plan update process around densifying single-family neighborhoods exemplified this in spades. The process never took citizens’ concerns seriously. The drama performance, biased polls and secret meetings by random citizens to direct the “15-minute neighborhood” work were bad. And there was not even one time when those of us hugely impacted by the proposed massive densification of our neighborhoods were taken seriously. The council ignored the critiques that were made, so the staff took the beating. The heat even reached the county commissioners at their recent hearing on the BVCP update, when a number of citizens came and complained because the commissioners were their last resort.

This problem is going to become very serious with the city’s budgetary woes that have emerged with the need to rebuild or replace recreation centers, the police building and make other necessary expenditures for which there appears to be no money. I was curious, and so I did the basic analyses and found very significant increases over the last 10 years in the city’s operating budget and personnel numbers, which don’t seem to relate to any perceived improvement in levels of service.

I’ve communicated these to the council. But rather than this triggering some serious introspection, they’ve been pretty much ignored or discounted. This makes Matt and Tina’s request to communicate concerns directly to the council seem pretty hollow.

The problem of citizen complaints has been made even worse by the council’s limiting the Council Agenda Committee’s scheduling to too much work in too little time. This makes it even more difficult to ensure that agenda materials and processes will work for both the council and citizens. These areas would be good places to focus some serious attention.

I can imagine objections to what I’m saying: This all will take too much time, meetings will run late, etc., etc. I would simply respond: 1) if you actually deal with something, it won’t take up your time in the future, and so save a lot of time in the long run, and 2) the citizens will be a lot happier and will complain less if you fix problems rather than ignoring them.