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The Mountain View City Council stuck to its current priorities in a review of the city’s work plan Tuesday night, despite a push to prioritize a performance audit of citywide functions, clamping down on outside political spending and prohibiting the use of artificial turf.
The City Council, in a 5-2 vote, approved a motion to accept the city’s updated work plan that included the removal of two items and a request for city staff to look into “continuous improvement processes,” potentially in the form of performance audit reviews, but not to include it among the city’s priorities for now.
Council members Emily Ann Ramos and Lucas Ramirez cast the dissenting votes at the council meeting Tuesday, Feb. 27.
The City Work Plan is a guiding document that helps the city prioritize its time and resources by identifying critical projects. The projects typically are carried out within three to five years of the work plan adoption, which happens every two years, and occurred most recently last June.
The council’s 2023-2025 work plan identifies 41 project areas, ranked by priority, with the majority labeled as “highest priority.” Of the 41 total projects, 32 are in progress, two are delayed and seven have not yet started, according to the council report.
The council, for the most part, did not focus on these already identified projects, instead weighing ideas for new work items. This included whether to consider the so-called continuous improvement processes, which Council member Lisa Matichak described as a type of performance audit, distinct from financial audits.
“The goal is to have a person or group of people take a look at specific processes or functions and make recommendations on ways to improve the efficiency or the effectiveness of the process or the function to identify risks or vulnerabilities,” Matichak said.
Mayor Pat Showalter strongly supported the proposal and described the value of making continuous adjustments and improvements to internal processes that could be systematically implemented with the creation of a new position dedicated to this function.
This kind of position was possible, per direction of the city charter, according to City Attorney Jennifer Logue, who added that the auditor would need to have experience as an accountant but could have other areas of expertise as well.
Council member Margaret Abe-Koga pushed back on the proposal, citing potential budgetary constraints and the disruption it could cause for everyday work routines. “Let’s fill the positions we have,” she said, referring to the city’s large number of staff vacancies. “And that should help with performance.”
Council member Alison Hicks also expressed doubts about the proposal, asking for more information and raising concerns about the potential risk of a heavy-handed approach to reviewing staff performances. “I like continuous improvement, but I like it to come creatively from the people who are doing the job,” she said.
To allay some of these concerns, Ramirez said that he was envisioning the process of continuous improvement as a collaborative endeavor. “I think staff are in the best position to elevate, to us, opportunities for improvement,” Ramirez said, adding that he wanted to hear ideas from staff about how to streamline processes and bring in new technologies for better efficiency and cost savings.
Council members Emily Ann Ramos and Ramirez also raised another proposal for the city’s work plan, which was to limit outside influences in local elections by regulating independent expenditures. Ramos proposed that this could occur by banning foreign contributions to corporations, similar to what was being done in San Jose.
“It’s basically closing a loophole that Citizens United opened up. Citizens United allowed basically unregulated corporate spending,” Ramirez said, referring to a Supreme Court ruling that reversed campaign finance restrictions.
Despite interest among some of the council members, the proposal was left out of the final motion. Over the course of the discussion, several council members said they were not open to adding more to the work plan, given that many priority items had not yet even been addressed.
Members of the public, meanwhile, requested that the City Council prioritize an ordinance banning artificial turf, citing environmental and public health concerns. The council deliberated on the issue, noting some complications with private property and school property uses, ultimately asking staff to investigate the issue for formal consideration at a later time.
Speakers also asked the council to make its “dark sky” ordinance and ban on vaping sales a higher priority.
As part of its motion, the council removed two items on the work plan: one was a proposal for periodic amendments to the municipal code and the other was an exploration for a ballot measure to amend the City Charter. The updated work plan also included the removal of the proposal for a temporary office cap to new developments downtown.
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They should do performance audits.
Like the private sector does.
Has anybody noticed how Amazon, Kaiser Permanente, Banks, and many Customer Service Organization send a questionnaire where they make an effort to determine how effective their customer interaction is and if problems were actually solved?
Well, I don’t expect our city government to follow up on the performance audits. The most charitable case is merely that government tends to lag private sector in terms of implementing best practices. The non-charitable case is that they don’t want to be held accountable for serving the citizens. You decide.
At the end of the day, I think performance audits would reveal interesting results :). Sometime I think rich cities such as MV get sloppy on how they deliver services.
Agreed with the above comment. Private companies do this all day long.