New city manager should of fer bold solutions
Too often, elected leaders hire professionals for their chief administrative positions that they feel can be bent to their will. While this might be comfor ting, like ingesting a fresh marshmallow, the long-term impact is unhealthy for the Boulder City Council and our community. Don’t do it!
Boulder has an abundance of well-educated citizens vying for dominance in crafting the future direction for our community.
Our organization, Better Boulder, believes a more compact community will generate greater housing diversity, facilitate convenient alternative transportation options and increase energy efficiency. We certainly want someone wellversed and accepting of these principles.
Of course, we’d like the new city manager to see ever ything our way. We can’t and don’t expect that. Instead, what our community needs is a city manager who stands on their own two feet and tells all of us, in their thoroughly studied, well-considered and unbiased opinion, what is best for our community. In other words, no marshmallows, please.
That doesn’t mean we expect our new city manager to enter the position without perspective. Quite to the contrar y, our new city manager should be familiar with addressing the types of circumstances they will face in Boulder.
That means someone with a histor y of working though the familiar battle lines over development issues, a positive force in achieving greater equity, diversity and inclusion, and shares our environmental stewardship values.
The challenges Boulder faces, though, aren’t readily amenable to of f-the-shelf solutions. Therefore, we should reject anyone who claims they come here with the solutions at hand.
What we need is someone who will actively listen to understand the depth of our needs, accounting for the interests of all stakeholders, then research all viable solutions and innovate to fit our precise circumstances. They also must have demonstrated success, building capable staff teams that are committed to these same practices.
And then, in the face of our community’s penchant for resistance, our new city manager must have the gumption to of fer bold solutions for our City Council to consider.
Sure, our political leadership can choose to turn away. They still must encourage this type of challenging recommendations from their chief administrator, lest we muddle through a future of halfstep policies and limp actions that lead us in a direction that is insufficient to satisfy our stated values.
This City Council has the chance to leave an imprint on the future direction for our community in the form of its city manager selection.
The marshmallows are out there, soft and sweet. Instead, we ask that you challenge yourselves and the community with a city manager who drives an agenda for tackling our greatest difficulties headon and for taking bold action in a direction that is consistent with our values.