Not all cities and counties make performance targets public
Department heads in Hollister and San Benito County write
performance goals for themselves every year. Although local
officials agree on their importance, they disagree about whether
the public has the right to view them.
Not all cities and counties make performance targets public
Department heads in Hollister and San Benito County write performance goals for themselves every year. Although local officials agree on their importance, they disagree about whether the public has the right to view them.
In San Benito County government, a request for performance goals of department heads was fulfilled for contract and non-contract directors.
Nearby cities and counties contacted by the Pinnacle, including Morgan Hill, Pacific Grove, Santa Clara County and Santa Cruz County, use performance goals or work plans for department heads. Morgan Hill was the only agency whose officials make the information public.
Performance goals for department heads in San Benito County included:
– Improving, modeling and supporting competence and character, by Susan Thompson, county administrative officer
– Be visible in our community, by Kathryn Flores, director of health and human services
– When feasible, continue to apply for grants that are focused on prevention, by Alan Yamamoto, director of behavioral health.
– Complete a proposed modular building, by Paul Matulich, agricultural commissioner and sealer of weights and measures
Within the city of Hollister, performance goals are included in an employee’s personnel file and considered confidential, said Stephanie Atigh, city attorney for Hollister.
“I don’t know how the goals are written because I’ve never seen them,” Atigh said. “I do know on some evaluations that I have seen, not for department heads but for other employees, the goals have related to deficiencies and those things would be confidential.”In order for information to be exempt from public disclosure, government officials must prove that disclosure would involve an unwarranted invasion of privacy, said Jim Ewert, legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association.
For department heads, performance goals are related to the job, not the individual, Ewert said.
“Almost by definition the goals cannot, if disclosed, create an unwarranted invasion of privacy,” Ewert said. “Even if under some tortured definition of the law there was some privacy issue by disclosure, it would probably be warranted.”
The public has the right to know what the expectations are for high-ranking public employees in their community, Ewert said.
Atigh disagreed.
“My understanding, they’re on their evaluations,” Atigh said. “If they are on your evaluations we are not going to allow anyone to see them.”
In San Benito County, salary increases are tied to performance evaluations- whether or not the employee met their performance goals, said Richard Inman, assistant county administrative officer.
Thompson evaluates department heads on the anniversary of their hiring date. They also discuss goals for the coming year.
“Well, I think it establishes the direction and the programs or plans and projects that are a priority that you want to get accomplished in the year after your anniversary date,” Inman said.
County department heads wrote their performance goals in a variety of formats, including outlines and essays.
“Ideally, you would like them to be in some sort of standardized format,” said Reb Monaco, a San Benito County supervisor.
Inman agreed.
“You’d know exactly what you are looking at when you look at it,” Inman said. “I just haven’t gotten to it.”
This is the first year that salary increases were mandated for all employees, Inman said.
Even without a standardized format, performance goals are comprehensible, Monaco said.
“I think that if the goals are written clearly enough, then anyone with a sixth grade education could sit down and say you have achieved them or not,” Monaco said.
The point is for staff members and their supervisor to understand the performance goals, Monaco said.
“There has to be an understanding on both sides of those otherwise it’s not really a contract,” Monaco said.
“I think they’re being taken very, very seriously,” Monaco said.
Among Thompson’s goals were “improving, modeling and supporting Competence and Character in the county organization.”
Specific areas of focus included, “keeping the General Plan revision process moving forward at a pace acceptable to the Board” and “facilitating your Boards decision-making process to complete a Financing Plan for the construction of Justice Facilities.”
Some people might consider such goals vague, Monaco said.
“To some people, a goal for a director might be that you have establish x number of permits in some year,” Monaco said.
That opens up all type of speculation about how many permits should be handed out in one year, Monaco said.
“A goal of streamlining the permitting process is obtainable,” Monaco said. “You have baseline information that you could compare.”
Performance goals provide accountability, Monaco said.
“For a lot of reasons, in the past people were not evaluated because it was uncomfortable for the evaluator,” Monaco said. “Now we have a system in place where we do every evaluation faithfully We pull out their goals and objectives and we move on.”
Unlike San Benito, in Santa Cruz County and Santa Clara County, performance goals are confidential, similar to Hollister.
At the beginning of the year, city council members identify their top priorities, said Doug Emerson, Hollister’s mayor.
“If the organization is run right, then those goals have to reflect all the way down,” Emerson said. “They get more individualized as they go down the line.”
The point is to evaluate an employee at the end of the year, Emerson said.
“One very big goal for our city manager over the last two years was to make sure that the sewer project was finished on time and on budget,” Emerson said. “A performance goal would be, in a year, reduce our budget deficit by 50 percent.”
If the deficit is not reduced at the end of the year, the evaluation process allows city officials to find out why.
“Next year if we don’t do that, we’re going to find another city manager,” Emerson said.
Performance goals for the city’s four department heads could be made public, Emerson said.
“They have to be very close to the four priorities that the council would have and they would probably not be as directed towards the person,” Emerson said. “We never discussed whether we make Clint’s performance goals public or not. For me, I see no reason not to.”
Performance goals are private, “because that’s typically how it has been handled,” said Clint Quilter, Hollister’s city manager. “That’s typically the way most people handle it.”
There could be benefits to making the performance goals of department heads public, Quilter said.
“In the grand scheme of things, that kind of thing outside of the performance evaluation process is probably not a bad idea,” Quilter said. “I think it would depend on the situation and how it was set up. I would be interested in seeing what the county’s looks like.”
Morgan Hill has a public process for performance goals, said Ed Tewes, city manager of Morgan Hill.
After city council members establish overarching goals, department heads prepare work plans that lay out how they will accomplish those goals.
“The work plan is then presented to city council for approval,” Tewes said. “That’s different from any confidential performance goals that might be like, show up to work early every morning. Goals about accomplishing city business are public information.”
Their system provides a few advantages.
“The advantages of the work plan are first that it establishes the objectives in measurable terms,” Tewes said. “The act of preparing the plan is also a beneficial exercise.”
Writing a work plan makes employees think through how they will accomplish goals that city council set, Tewes said. The system has been in place for six or seven years.
“My predecessors have similar processes,” Tewes said. “I think you will find that every city does it a little differently.”
Although department managers in Pacific Grove are responsible for writing a work plan each year, that plan is not a public document, said Charlene Wiseman, deputy city manager for Pacific Grove.
“They would set goals and timelines and try to achieve that, and that would be a part of their personal evaluation,” Wiseman said.
Goals for every department are written into the budget but are less specific than the work plan for a department head, Wiseman said.
