CEO Roundtable: Officials work to serve, conserve, connect

BOULDER — For local governments in the Boulder Valley that are still struggling to climb out of floods, fires and the COVID-19 pandemic while still providing essential and expected services, sometimes “leaders have to be the bearers of bad news.”

That was the message that Jennifer Hoffman, manager for the city and county of Broomfield, delivered at BizWest’s CEO Roundtable on government issues, held Tuesday at the Boulder offices of the Berg Hill Greenleaf Ruscitti law firm.

“‘No’ is the new four-letter word,” she said. “Discipline, no one likes that, no one likes the activity of it, no one likes to say it. In Broomfield specifically, this sweet, juicy community that we have been in has said ‘yes’ a lot over the last decade, and now it’s time for the payment to come.

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“The load on local governments is unprecedented,” Hoffman said. “When the state budget comes out on March 27, I think we’re all going to be white-knuckling it. I think resiliency is one thing, but buoyancy is another. We’re going to be underwater. How long can we hold our breath?”

The challenge, she said, is “how do we navigate not around it but through it.”

One answer is through presenting tradeoffs, said Brad Mueller, director of planning and development services for the city of Boulder.

The Boulder City Council “is entertaining the idea of tradeoffs in a way I’ve not experienced in my career,” Mueller said. “There’s still plenty of, ‘Can’t we do this and this and this,’ but when we’ve started to lay out options, they’ve been respectful in at least trying to engage in those discussions.

“I’m having the conversations: ‘I’m hearing you want more of this. Here are three things you could pick from that we could stop doing or slow down,’” he said. “It always comes with a little bit of, ‘Are you sure you couldn’t do it this way or that way,’ but ultimately we’ve been able to have that conversation somewhat successfully.”

Yvette Bowden, Boulder County’s assistant county manager, noted that the definition of government’s role “may not be different, but the pull is different. 

“We are shifting,” she said. “We know that the role of government will not be just to focus on people who are in the most need. But the tradeoffs are real because you cannot do things with one-time dollars, and they are going away quickly.

“Recently we’ve been really thankful to the community for wanting to invest in things like wildfire mitigation, but those are forward-thinking eyes when people are still trying to put food on the table.”

Government officials’ job, said Colorado Counties Inc. executive director Kelly Flenniken, “is to make sure that our residents and constituencies understand what local government does, and that it is not cheap and certainly not free.”

Erie town manager Malcolm Fleming said he constantly has to deal with “how little people understand what government does. They jump to conclusions about what government can do, like ‘Why don’t you have a grocery store there?’ As if we can simply pull levers and make things appear.”

Bowden, Flenniken and others on the panel agreed that the fiscal and personal effects of COVID and the recent disasters still linger.

“We said the pandemic is over. That was a really wonderful declaration, and people felt great about that. But it is most certainly not over,” Flenniken said. “The burden on county government to provide for the ongoing health and those kinds of human-being needs is still very much in play, and the money is going away. We have to take care of our people, so we have to have money there for that. So maybe that means we’re not going to pave the road and we’re having constituents calling about that dang pothole every day and we’re going to be very frustrated and we might lose our job about that pothole. But we do have to take care of kids and adults and everybody who is still very much going through a health pandemic crisis.”

“It feels like COVID is over, but not really,” Bowden said. “We have more people that need the government more intensely than they did a decade ago.”

Much of the ability to cover those costs comes from property taxes, and officials have been hearing howls of protest over increased assessments.

“Your property bill is the way you pay for your local education, for your housing initiatives, for your transportation, all these things that are made on a regional basis and that we need to be great partners in,” Bowden said, and Flenniken said officials have had to deal with “how little people know about what they pay for when they pay their property taxes and who gets it. It’s not that the counties get this huge windfall a couple times a year and they now just have gobs of money. They would love for that to be the case. They have a ton that they have to give to education, special districts, all kinds of things.”

Even across the Boulder Valley, different communities experienced and dealt with the pandemic in different ways. As Longmont city manager Harold Dominguez pointed out, “Every community’s different. You have to understand the nuances of your community.”

It definitely was different in Erie, Fleming said.

“When we went into the pandemic, we hunkered down. We thought we were going to see significant revenue drops in Erie,” he said. “In contrast, what we saw there was an increase in revenue because people were staying home and spending online, and we do get a portion of sales-tax revenue from online purchases.

“That’s in contrast to what Boulder was seeing,” he said, because people there “weren’t spending as much money because they weren’t going into the office. They actually did see a significant retraction in revenue.

“So as is the case in lots of issues in local government, it depends on your unique circumstances locally. It also depends on what mix of services you provide,” Fleming said. “In Erie, we’re expanding dramatically because of all the building that hasn’t stopped at all even though interest rates are high. We’ve got several major large developments that are happening. We don’t do the same social-services and health-care related kinds of things the counties do. That dramatically affects what we’re able to provide in our financial future as well.”

Even with those new developments, Erie is not awash in spendable revenue from building permit fees. That money, Fleming explained, “is really supposed to reflect the cost of maintaining the whole system of reviewing plans, inspecting buildings as they go up and making sure they’re built according to code. “We don’t look at that as a long-term revenue source. If we did, we’d be saving some of it for the time when development slows down. It’s more intended to cover the cost of the review process. It’s not a profit center. We don’t have a profit center.”

Longmont is in a different position as well, Dominguez said.

“We’re the most economically diverse and the most racially diverse,” he said. “I think that actually helps in terms of how we weathered through the pandemic.”

Noting that Longmont also provides things such as electric utilities and social services, Dominguez said, the city’s emphasis is on those vital functions. Longmont officials want “equity, safety and sustainability,” he said, but “your communities don’t care about your aspirational work when your core functions aren’t working.”

Boulder is “still very much coming out of the flood, having experienced two subsequent fires, COVID, and all the other things that have been a shock to the system,” Bowden said. “When those shocks to the system happen, even though we are so thankful to the federal government, the state government and our representatives who have given outstanding support, that doesn’t change some of the decisions we had to make to get people to be able to rebuild faster and differently, more sustainably, to be able to have a place to go to work, to have small businesses be open and out of debt, and what is the role of government in that.”

Inflation has affected the cost of everything from city services to housing affordability, the city and county leaders agreed.

“A lot of people don’t realize that we feel inflation, just like I feel it at home,” Dominguez said, noting the higher prices the city must pay for things like concrete, asphalt and transformers.

And just as with private businesses, the inflation in housing prices makes it a challenge to hire and retain workers for government agencies as well.

“Particularly in Boulder County, the cost of living in the communities that we need employees in is becoming such a challenge that talent and housing affordability are the No. 1 and 2 workforce challenges that we hear from our industries,” said Erin Fosdick, CEO of the Longmont Economic Development Partnership. “The cost of materials and supply-chain issues are still up there, but housing continues to be a No. 1 issue.”

Having to live a distance from the cities they’re serving undermines their sense of community, she said.

“As folks get farther and farther away, it becomes easier for them to think about a different place of employment,” Fosdick said. “Even for the local-government folks around this table, local government is a place-based profession. In the past, people came to an organization and stayed there because they were so connected to that community. When you have a lot of staff that don’t know the community and don’t feel connected, it’s a lot easier to leave.”

The officials agreed that keeping their constituents engaged in the process is an ongoing process, but Fosdick said part of that is teaching them about timing. Noting the public protests about the impact of various proposed developments, she said “we haven’t set the table right to let people know that the appropriate time to engage is when you’re doing a comprehensive plan, when you’re doing an overall development plan, when you’re writing your code, when you’re having these budget conversations, because everyone’s coming together and talking about what their values are, how our budget should be spent.

“So in some ways, we’re trying harder to do more engagement, but in some ways we’re not valuing the engagement we’re getting because we’re letting people derail projects because of emotion,” she said. “It’s not to suggest that change isn’t hard, and if something’s being built next to you you don’t have maybe more feeling around that. I absolutely get that. But I think in some communities we haven’t done a great job of helping people understand the planning and engagement that’s already gone into something. It’s going to be increasingly harder because everyone is so busy, so they’re not willing to engage until there’s a crisis.”

That quest has led Broomfield to increase its communications staff from three to 11, Hoffman said, describing social media as “such a great divider and uniter. It depends on in whose hands and what the intent is. If it’s to disrupt, you can do it instantaneously, but when there’s some kind of accident, our communities rally.”

One voice that needs to be at the table, but too often isn’t, is that of business, said Jeff Romine, director of economic vitality for the city and county of Broomfield.

“You don’t hear business people speaking up any more,” Romine said. “The only time, in most cases, when you see a business at a council meeting is when it’s their proposal, their development. Otherwise you don’t hear business people. They think they’ll be drowned out or they’ve just decided they don’t want to play any more.”

However, he said, “they pay a share of those taxes, a significant share, and we need to hear those voices.”

In all areas of local government, Dominguez said, “if you find balance, there’s a win-win for everyone, but you’ve got to really take the time to listen to everyone, and negotiate that balance. We’ve been successful at times and we’ve failed miserably at times. But it’s going to take all of us.”

The CEO Roundtable was also attended by sponsors Jim Cowgill of Plante Moran; Jon Svoboda of Bank of Colorado; and Josh Marks and Ashley Cawthorn of Berg Hill Greenleaf Ruscitti LLP.