Accountability · Jamieson for Boulder

Boulder doesn't have a shortage of good ideas. What we're missing is the sentence that comes after a good idea: here's what this is supposed to accomplish, here's the number that will tell us whether it did, and here's the date we're going to come back and check.

Without that sentence, everything survives. A program that's quietly failing looks exactly like a program that's quietly working, because nobody ever measured either one. So we keep both, we fund both, and a decade later we've got a budget nobody can explain and a maintenance backlog in the hundreds of millions.

I know how our budget looks from the outside because I went and looked. It's a bit of a black hole, so I had to build an application to extract the data in order to recreate a balance sheet, and then had to build more extractors just to map projects to line items. Humans have been building balance sheets for a very long time. There's no reason ours needs to be that inscrutable, and the fact that a resident has to write software to read his own city's finances is the whole problem in a single sentence.

Go look at the city's Budgeting for Resilience and Equity dashboard sometime. What you'll find is that a lot of departments can't tell you what their own priorities are. That's not a software problem. It's a management habit, and habits can be changed.

I started my career as an internal auditor at American Express and spent the twenty years after that building cybersecurity programs, where the entire job is knowing whether the thing you built is actually holding up. Thus, three commitments.

An independent City Auditor

A peer to the City Manager, not an employee of one. Nonpartisan, a small staff, and the standing to review expenditures and ongoing projects and report to council in public.

Our charter already allows this. We have simply never done it, which means that today the only people who evaluate a program are the people who run it. That isn't a criticism of staff, it's a structural problem, and no amount of good faith fixes it.

An auditor's real value isn't catching anyone. It's giving the people inside the building who already know something isn't working the cover to say so.

A target before the vote

Every new program and every new tax should arrive at council with a stated goal, a measure, and a date when we look again, all of it written down before anyone votes on it.

Not a mission statement. Not a values paragraph. A number and a date.

If we can't articulate what success looks like before we spend the money, we've admitted we won't be able to recognize it afterward.

Default off, not default on

A program that misses its stated target twice comes back to council for a vote to continue.

Right now the burden sits entirely on whoever wants to stop something, which is why we never stop anything.

Flipping it around is the cheapest real reform on this whole site. It costs nothing to do. It just requires being willing to have the conversation on the record.

And one that applies to me

I'll publish my own scorecard.

Once a year, on this site, I'll publish what I said I'd do and whether I did it. Some of it is going to be uncomfortable reading, and I'd rather write it than have somebody else write it for me.

If I'm going to ask departments to be measured against their own commitments, I ought to be first in line.

The part that isn't about cuts

I want to be plain about something, because this argument gets misheard constantly.

This isn't a pitch to spend less. Lots of people talk about cuts, and frankly I don't think they're there in the volume people imagine, and I don't think there's much appetite for them in this electorate either. Boulder has never met a tax it didn't like. I'm not going to pretend otherwise to win a news cycle.

This is a pitch to be able to tell whether the spending worked. Those are two different arguments, and only one of them actually makes the city run better. If we measure honestly and the answer comes back that a program is doing its job, then good, we fund it with confidence instead of hope. That's a better outcome for the people who believe in the program, not a worse one.