Councilor Jessica King will serve as Deputy Mayor (DM) this year on the Oshkosh Common Council. The major responsibility of that position is to facilitate the annual evaluation of the City Manager (CM).
During my term as DM, I said that the CM evaluation should be guided by three principles: fairness, rigor, and transparency. All the principles are crucial, but without transparency there really is no way for the public to know if the evaluation process was in fact fair or rigorous.
Several months ago, when the Council in open session discussed the CM evaluation process, it seemed clear that the majority were not comfortable with releasing evaluation information that linked evaluative comments or survey scores to individual councilors. At that time City Attorney Lorenson provided us with a memo that [in my opinion] did not take a clear stand on what could or could not be released as part of the process.
In March, I released to the press a memo that summarized the Council's evaluation scores.
Early this month, the local corporate press filed an open records request (which to this day I have not seen) asking for additional materials (I found this somewhat interesting since this is the same outfit that said that we should "praise in public and criticize in private" or some such worn cliche'). I provided Director of Personnel John Fitzpatrick all the material I compiled in the process, which included survey scores attached to individual councilors and summary comments that were made in closed session. The materials can be found here.
An objective reading of these materials will show that the evaluation of Mr. Rohloff was in fact fair and rigorous. The documents do not indicate any cheap shots or attempts to minimize Mr. Rohloff's accomplishments. Nor do the documents reveal any kind of old boy network sweeping under the rug of legitimate concerns. Indeed, my perception during the entire process was that all councilors and Mr. Rohloff took it very seriously and appreciated the interaction.
My hope is that the release of these material will go a long way toward ending what I think has been, for too many years, unnecessary secrecy in the evaluation process. I'm confident that Councilor King will continue to keep the process open and in fact look for ways to increase the transparency.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Relating to the position of City Manager, I think that the Council should consider changing its hiring/firing procedure so as to make those sensitive decisions with a secret ballot. When the City Manager can see how you vote on his position, you are given a very strong incentive to vote insincerely, because you don't want to be the odd man out. Consider the decision (vote) to hire City Manager Rohloff, for example, in which (if memory serves) Karl Nollenberger strongly advised the Council to vote unanimously for the sake of appearances. (I don't mean to imply that the Common Council shouldn't have hired Mr. Rohloff. This is strictly a comment on the process, and not about Mr. Rohloff, in particular.)
Did the Council ever release its evaluation of, and its votes for, the City Manager candidates, which took place in closed session?
BTW, since I wrote that last comment, I bumped into Karl Nollenberger and asked him why he had advised the Council members to vote unanimously when they gave their final vote to hire a particular candidate for the position of City Manager. He told me that he did that because the canadidate may turn down the job offer, if it is a split vote, because he may worry that employment job may not last long enough to be worth the move.
No votes for the City Manager candidates and/or evaluation of same were ever released. I don't even know that such votes/evaluations even exist because, as I recall, no formal minutes were taken.
Post a Comment