“Play nice, Council & Mayor” The Colorado Springs Business Journal, March 30 – April 5, 2012, 21.

PLAY NICE AND BE RESPONSIBLE

Let’s assume that the strong mayor and the nine members of council are here to stay for a while; let’s also assume that the city’s legal team cannot quite sort out their lines of authority. These assumptions do not warrant, in themselves, the kind of childish behavior we have been observing in the past few months. Grow up and try to do your jobs! Otherwise, take your toys and go home to play alone.

This is a city, after all, not the school yard. Instead of figuring out who is right and who said what to whom, instead of laying blame on this incident or that slight, perhaps we should outline our expectations.

Start with the strong mayor: you should manage city administration, oversee the Police and Fire departments, and be the city’s chief promoter. Make the city bureaucracy the best it can be, being both business-friendly and citizen-friendly, treating the taxpayers as stakeholders to whom every one of them is accountable. Whether filling potholes or collecting sales-taxes, all city employees should become models of courtesy and genuine care, ensuring that we are all served fairly and well, and if possible, with a smile.

As for the nine councilmembers: forget whatever you used to do and how you deliberated about every little issue twice monthly. There are professionals who can take care of the day-to-day operations, while you should divide oversight responsibilities among you to ensure direct engagement. Here are nine areas of focus:

1.    Parks and recreation: budgets, facilities, operations, programs

2.    Roads and infrastructure: potholes, zoning, public transportation

3.    Real-estate holding: what is owned, leased, bought and sold, budgets

4.    Tourism and marketing: city facilities and the Visitors and Convention Bureau

5.    Sports (including USOC): bike tours and trails, city leagues, Sky Sox, arena

6.    Utilities (until sold): deep understanding of operations, budgets, and planning

7.    Urban Renewal Authority: site selection, bonds, future planning

8.    Finance and budgets: details of every department needs and expenditures

9.    Education: school districts (consolidated?), higher education, Air Force Academy

If each council member focused on one area and reported monthly to the others what’s going on in his or her area, then everyone would be better informed and make decisions more rationally.

Councilmembers can decide among themselves who’ll do what, as long as they keep the real estate guys away from real-estate matters to ensure avoidance of conflict-of-interest voting (do they recuse themselves now?).

Assume you don’t like these nine areas; please put forth others. For example, should there be one dedicated to the Military or one to the Downtown?  Assume you don’t like one person being the leader in one area, then double up and have two members cover certain areas. This is a minor adjustment compared to nine members pretending to be experts or involved or even knowledgeable about all the areas on which they regularly vote.

This isn’t that complicated from a business stand-point: the CEO oversees everything, but in large organizations delegation of responsibility makes sense. One cannot expect the mayor, strong or weak, to really manage well such a large organization without division of labor and without the collaboration of council.

Just because councilmembers don’t see the mayor as their “boss” for obvious reasons (they were elected to their positions to represent constituents), isn’t sufficient ground for turning this city into a malfunctioning operation that might scare potential newcomers.

Perhaps we don’t want the Chicago Daley model of a strong mayor, but Chicago’s garbage was collected and streets were plowed when it snowed (Jane Byrne served only one term because of snow-plowing problems). Our city doesn’t collect the garbage and rarely plows. So, perhaps our governance model should be different.

We have local experts who might help with this, and I don’t mean the scores of therapists who can help in group therapy to find what ails these ten elected officials. Do we really want to hear about their potty-training or childhood traumas? Let’s hope not.

Instead of psycho-therapists, UCCS’ Chancellor, Professor Pam Schokley-Zalabak, who specializes in organization management, and whose own experience running a large institution that has different constituents (including tenured professors she cannot fire), could be helpful. If she is unavailable, perhaps someone with expertise similar to hers can be of service.

Getting elected is one thing—it’s a beauty or popularity contest of sorts. Being an effective public official is quite another. If any of our Elected Ten wants our respect, they better earn it on the job! Their past got them elected, but it’s the present that we must judge: it’s their work right now that matters to us.

Who knows, if the Elected Ten get their act together, we might rightfully aspire to compete with Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon as one of those second-tier great cities!

Raphael Sassower is professor of philosophy at UCCS. He can be reached at rsassower@gmail.com See previous articles at sassower.blogspot.com

  

“Utilities gamble might be community’s loss,” The Colorado Springs Business Journal, March 23 - 29, 2012, 21.

CSU’S GAMBLE MAY BE OUR LOSS

If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen! Chefs know that. Perhaps politicians and public officials should learn from them.

In its News Release of 10/4/2011, Scott Hente, CSU’s Chairman, said “This is great news for our community. NeuStream will save money for Colorado Springs Utilities’ ratepayers because it will be installed at lower cost than traditional scrubbing technology and will require less operating and maintenance expenditures.” Coming from a non-expert who is embroiled in legal disputes, as the Gazette has reported, can we trust this judgment?

This is the same guy whose judgment about the default on the Urban Renewal Authority’s N. Nevada project, according to the Gazette was: “’The deal was good. The deal still is good,’ said Scott Hente, president of the Colorado Springs City Council and an authority board member.” You may dislike Mayor Bach, but at least he has initiated on 2/15/12 an inspection of the URA because of financial concerns. Should Hente resign and take care of his personal affairs? After all, we don’t pay him enough to divest himself from his real estate deals, unlike the salary we give the mayor to focus on city affairs.

This is what we should fear: politicians sanctioning the work of others without warrant. Relying exclusively on reports generated by URA or CSU is like never asking for a second opinion before a major surgery.

Has Hente or the CSU’s CEO fully disclosed that the technology trade-marketed to Neumann Systems is experimental? Does it matter that CSU is a “pilot project” with a $7.2 million award from the DOE? Has anyone been alarmed that about $17 million was spent as of 9/3/10 on this project, and that an estimated $180 million will be spent overall?

CSU’s answer is that without Neumann’s experimental technology $360 million will be spent “to control SOX, NOX and other particulates.” So, it sounds reasonable, even responsible to spend half of that amount on an alternative.

But the question remains: is Neumann’s solution the best alternative? Though promising in many ways, is there no other alternative worthy of $180 million to replace coal-generated energy? 

It’s not that local engineers shouldn’t be consulted. Neither should we eschew local expertise just because it’s local. It is one thing to solicit local advice and quite another to commit large sums of money as a gamble on what might be the greatest success or the worst failure.

Have we heard about the entire process that led CSU to prefer a brilliant local solution over all those available in the world of energy operation?

Xcel, for example, has not chosen Neumann, but is considering a multiple-pronged approach to dealing with EPA requirements, from retiring some plants, retrofitting others, and using different sources of energy. Has CSU’s leadership spoken to Xcel’s executives and solicited their advice?

CSU’s Grossman responded to my inquiries:

“The EPA and the state of Colorado require Colorado Springs Utilities to comply with new stricter emissions control equipment at our power plants by 2016. Using conventional scrubber equipment, the cost to comply would be an estimated $300 million or more. Installing Neumann Systems Group's air purification device instead of conventional scrubbers is projected to save at least $100 million. So far, approximately $40 million has been spent on testing, designing and implementation. Installation is expected to begin in September 2012.”

Though these numbers differ from the CSU’s News Release and CSBJ’s articles quoted above, CSU remains on message: this is a good technology, even if not fully tested. Don’t question us. All we need from Council is a yes vote anytime they convene as our Board.

Lest I be accused again of not accurately reporting the facts, let me reassure everyone that mine are wild speculations whose veracity is open to challenge. Unfortunately, neither Forte nor Hente are forthcoming, so I must stay at the speculative level.

It’s difficult to report facts when CSU stonewalls the public. For example, when asking about cost-savings at CSU in the area of the motor pool, all I could get is a chart dated 11/28/11 about the percentage of vehicle categories, and a report from 1/7/08 by Mercury.

In 2007 CSU had 1,754 “units” whose replacement cost was $74 million. With an average “replacement spending (since 2000)” of $5.3 million annually, who is overseeing this process? One wonders if anyone digs deep down this rabbit-hole to make sure that a 10% saving on this “average” may be achieved. Perhaps it’s done, but how would we know?

Last time we trusted officials in large institutions without political or regulatory oversight, we got the mortgage bubble. Let’s pray we don’t face locally an energy-rate bubble.

Raphael Sassower is professor of philosophy at UCCS and is still waiting to meet with CSU’s CEO Forte or Chairman Hente. He can be reached at rsassower@gmail.com See previous articles at sassower.blogspot.com