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HomeMy WebLinkAbout03-31-25 Public Comment - D. Kaveney - Thoughts about current city governance structureFrom:Dan Kaveney To:Bozeman Goverment Study Commission Subject:[EXTERNAL]Thoughts about current city governance structure. Date:Monday, March 31, 2025 11:42:43 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. Dear Bozeman Study Commission Delegates, Thank you all for volunteering to serve on the government study commission. Iappreciate your willingness to do this necessary work in service to our community. Thank you also for this opportunity to offer input about what I hope you’ll be able toaccomplish. I am commenting in writing because I will be out of town on April 3 and unable to attend the public meeting either in person or online. To help you put my comments in context, I’ve been a Bozeman resident since 1989, andhave done my best to contribute to the community during that time. My wife, Marcia, and I raised two kids in Bozeman, and have enjoyed our lives here over the decades. I’vebeen involved as a citizen in local government issues off and on over the years, so I’ve had some experience working with Bozeman’s various city commissions. When it comes to the day-to-day business of keeping things running the City of Bozemandoes a remarkably good job. Even during recent years when things have been very challenging the city has, among other things, been operating effective police and fireorganizations, picking up the garbage, plowing the streets, getting water to our houses, treating wastewater, keeping the roads reasonably well-maintained, and running whatseems to be an effective bureaucracy to get all that done. As far as I know, this part of city government works very well, and any changes should be calibrated to preservethese effective organizations. City staff should be commended for all their good work in these arenas. Unfortunately, the political part of city government (I think of the political part ofgovernment as the part where Bozeman’s citizens, together, decide what our general policies should be and how those get applied to specific situations) has been aworsening disaster over the past 10 years or so, and all of our recent population boom challenges have brought the destructive inefficacy of these processes into very clearfocus. Citizens rightly feel disenfranchised and excluded from decision making processes. City codes are unevenly applied, poorly written, shoddily enforced, andstrongly slanted to favor developers working to advance out-of-town interests over the interests of local Bozeman residents. Citizens who try to get involved with the cityexperience their interactions with the commission and some city staff as contempt. We have outgrown our city’s political systems such that they are no longer producing theresults we need; our systems urgently need to be revised. When you’re figuring out how the city government should be changed, I hope you’ll keep the following big picture points in mind. These are general areas where I think wedesperately need to improve our performance: · This is a systems problem, not a people problem. Over the past 10 years or so (and before that) we have been fortunate to have hard-working commissioners who have tried to do a good job. Especially in recent years, though, the resultshave been abysmal. New commissioners will not solve this problem because the problem has been caused by the city’s systems for doing political things. Theyneed to be changed, and the new systems need to be simpler, more transparent, and make it far easier for citizens to have meaningful, tangible involvement thatleads to results on the ground rather than the current way of doing things that emphasizes being “listened to”. Citizens don’t much care if someone is listeningif they, the citizens, can’t produce results. · Better avenues for effective citizen involvement are needed. Citizens need to be able to get involved early enough to have an effect on eventual outcomes,and citizen advisory boards need the authority to make binding decisions that the city has to adhere to. How many times have we seen the community developmentboard recommend against something only to have the commissioners vote for it? Too many. What’s the point of an advisory board if they can’t actually doanything? We need to empower them. Failing that, just get rid of them. A powerless board is just a distracting façade.· Stronger citizen supervision for city staff is needed. Citizens, probably through their elected commissioners, need to have a stronger hand in the supervision of city staff. The current system where the commission sets policyand the city manager has all supervisory responsibility for staff is not working. The fact is, city managers are careerists who come and go. It’s a temporary job. Theyare not – and never will be – long term members of the community. Given this, they have too much authority over city staff. Commissioners need more of thatauthority. · More transparency about how city staff are directed and managed is needed. Related to the point above, city commissioners need a stronger hand indirecting and evaluating the performance of city staff. City staff work for the citizens and it is inappropriate in a city the size of Bozeman that commissionershave no input or control over their job instructions or performance evaluations. · Better codes and code enforcement are needed. The city has been doing a good job collecting public input for the UDC update. One hopes that the resultwill be simpler, better codes that reflect the values of the community, can be uniformly enforced, and that are subject to as little interpretation from city staffas possible. I do think the commission is out of step with most Bozeman residents with their almost religious fervor over aggressively increasing densityand promoting building. I mention this here because I think stronger, binding citizen involvement is a necessary tool to put a damper on commissions whoseenthusiasm for certain ideas (like increasing density) far outpaces the publics’. You’ve got a tough job ahead of you, but I think designing a government system that supports the conceptual changes suggested above will be critically important to oursuccess as a city. The coming years will likely be hard on Bozeman, and we will need effective, citizen-led local governance to weather them successfully. Thank you for reading this. I’m happy to engage in any email correspondence any of youwould like. And again, I very much appreciate your willingness to work on this very important project. Sincerely, Dan Kaveney -- **Dan Kaveney