Opinion: Thumbs Down To The Town Manager Evaluation Process

I rate the process this Town Council used to recently evaluate the town manager as unsatisfactory for the following reasons:

1. The council president manages the process. She is a good manager, but biased by the fact that she works with the town manager virtually daily and is too close. They are both partisan in favor of the majority’s agenda. The president also self-appoints to write the cover memo accompanying the evaluation, which is really all the public and media look at. The process should be managed by a neutral third party. 
   
2. There has not been an honest attempt to get input from the community, as evidenced by the fact that there were only two evaluations done by community members. Had the community received a form and the ability to rate the town manager in all the relevant areas, you would have seen much more participation. Asking for narrative evaluations is not helpful.
   
3. There has not been an honest attempt to get input from staff. Although a few more staff replied this year, there are ways to encourage more staff response. Also, the council did not see the result of the manager’s survey regarding high staff turnover, so it is impossible to know what happened there. The category of Town Manager Relationship with Staff was dropped from the evaluation form after year one, apparently as not important — a mistake in my opinion.
   
4. The council has given over its power to the town manager by reducing the number of specific town manager goals and evaluation criteria each year over the first three years of the council. That is a terrible precedent to set. In our first evaluation, we rated the town manager in 100 areas. This was a lot and there were many questions that councilors were unable to weigh in on. However, it did allow us to get a much better look at how many areas were commendable, satisfactory, need improvement, and unsatisfactory. Our second year, we rated the town manager in 47 areas. This was very manageable and allowed us to rate the manager in about 5 subcategories of each overarching category. This, our third year, our goals and evaluation criteria are so general that we have only one rating for each overarching area — only 10 ratings, which tend to be rounded in the town manager’s favor. Councilors — already overworked councilors, I might add — were asked to write a narrative to address the 22 pages of items listed by the town manager in his self-evaluation. No one will ever read these narratives and criticisms will be lost to history.

By criticizing the evaluation process, I am not at all suggesting that the town manager has done an unsatisfactory job. The critique is of this council, that continues to operate in an undemocratic, steamrolling fashion that I assume and hope was unintended by the Charter.

Darcy DuMont is a town councilor representing District 5.