Delray taking stock
Though the Delray Beach City Commission holds its most important meeting of the year tonight, the meeting isn’t shaping up that way.
On the agenda is the evaluation of City Manager Don Cooper, one of two employees who report to the commission. The other is the city attorney. A year ago, Cooper had been on the job only a few months and was still learning some of the basics about Delray Beach. Cooper now offers a much longer body of work on which the commission can evaluate him.
Yet no one seems quite sure of the evaluation format. In addition, the deadline for the mayor and commissioners to submit their written evaluations of Cooper was May 10, but the city’s human resources staff has had to prod the elected officials. As of Friday, Commissioner Jordana Jarjura was still working on hers. Mitch Katz said Monday he hadn’t finished. Neither had Shelly Petrolia, who cited personal issues and a recent vacation for the delay. Katz won’t be at tonight’s meeting because of a conflict.
These seemingly straightforward evaluations can get complicated. This year, the Community Redevelopment Agency board was poised to give Director Jeff Costello a favorable evaluation and a raise, but then one board member wanted Costello first to submit a self-evaluation. The majority objected, and Costello got his raise.
Mayor Cary Glickstein (above) said in an email Monday that the “general methodology” for the Cooper evaluation “would be similar to any senior level evaluation. What were the established goals of his direct reports? Did he achieve them? If not, why not? How would he evaluate his performance? What is he going to do different?” Petrolia, though, told me that she doesn’t anticipate discussion of a raise for Cooper, who makes the same $170,000 salary at which the commission started him in January 2015.
Glickstein and the commissioners didn’t want to discuss their evaluations until Cooper had seen them. In response to a specific question, however, Petrolia said Cooper had set a schedule for the commission to get information about the budget “and it looks like it will come earlier. That’s a good thing.” Commissioners had complained in February that during Cooper’s first budget cycle they had received too much information too late.
Other than that, how has Cooper done in the last year? Fairly well, I would say, given what he inherited and the agenda that immediately confronted him. He then had to deal with an ethics investigation involving the Environmental Services Department. Several key administrators, including the planning and zoning director, are newer to their jobs than Cooper.
Yet Delray Beach has made progress in the last 16 months. It hasn’t happened fast enough on some issues, such as street festivals, but it has happened. Notably, the city and the CRA are finding more ways for the CRA to absorb some expenses and free up money that Delray Beach can spend outside of downtown.
In evaluating Cooper, commissioners should acknowledge that they can’t credibly ask him to improve services dramatically and cut taxes. Delray Beach’s taxable property roll for 2015 may rise to $8 billion. That would an impressive rebound from the $6.1 billion post-recession level in 2012. It also would be lower than the pre-recession high of $8.7 billion in 2008. During the last eight years, the need for services has grown with Delray Beach’s population and the city’s heroin epidemic is straining public safety departments.
Katz asked Cooper to submit a self-analysis. Katz told me that the manager noted “progress” but acknowledged that he needs to improve in some areas. The same goes for the commission. Even the best city managers can do only as well as their bosses realistically allow.
And the one cent sales tax hike
Also at tonight’s meeting, the Delray Beach City Commission will vote on whether to support the proposed countywide, one-cent sales tax increase. Several hours earlier, the county commission will have voted to put the estimated $2.7 billion proposal on the November ballot. That vote almost certainly will be 5-2, with commissioners Steven Abrams and Hal Valeche opposed.
The tax would last for no more than 10 years. It would end earlier if the revenue hits $2.7 billion. County officials base that number on an average annual increase of 3 percent in sales tax revenue. The school district would get $1.35 billion, the county would get $810 million and the cities would split $540 million. In all cases, the money would go for infrastructure and capital projects, not operating expenses in general fund budgets.
Projections show that Boca Raton could receive as much as $61.5 million and Delray Beach $44.5 million. The Delray commission approved the earlier proposal that included $161 million for cultural groups and economic development, so this vote also should be favorable.
Attitudes toward the tax differ by city. Boca Raton is ambivalent. The city council will not take a vote. The city will not prepare a list of projects that the new revenue would finance. Mayor Susan Haynie has said Boca has no backlog of capital work.
Haynie told me Monday that the council will “educate our constituents on the pros and cons of the surtax,” not “advocate.” She has expressed concern that a higher sales tax could hurt south-county businesses if customers go to Broward, but as of last week a one-cent sales increase also appears likely for Broward’s November ballot.
In contrast, Delray Beach commissioners not only embrace the tax; they want more of it. Cities would divide the money on population, not how much revenue they generated. Such a formula would benefit Delray and Boca but penalize poorer cities. That’s why state law requires basing the share on population. Boynton Beach would get about $6 million more, even though Boynton would generate far less revenue than Delray.
Unlike Boca Raton, Delray Beach has a big infrastructure backlog. The city would spend $18 million in new sales tax revenue on road improvements, $4.6 million on a few fire station/training center and $3 million on Intracoastal Waterway seawalls, to deal with the effects of rising sea levels. The sales tax could obviate the need for Delray Beach to issue a capital improvement program based on a property tax increase.
Delray appoints sustainability officer
Speaking of those rising seas, Delray Beach has chosen a new, but familiar sustainability officer.
That would be Ana Puszkin-Chevlin. She previously led the city’s Rising Seas Task Force. Puszkin-Chevlin will report to Environmental Services Director John Morgan, who himself was promoted from the sustainability job. The changes ensure that nothing will change in Delray’s commendable effort to address this critical issue.
Boca’s downtown: how we got here
As the Boca Raton City Council awaits the June 13 presentation by the city’s traffic consultant, it can be interesting to look back at how the city got to where things are with the downtown.
An interested spectator at the April 11 report on the city’s open space guidelines for downtown projects was Jorge Camejo. He worked for Boca Raton from 1985 until 2010. From 1988 until 2008, he was director of the Community Redevelopment Agency, which oversees downtown. Camejo received the 2003 memo on how to interpret the guidelines. The straightforward memo caused council critics to howl that the city had been letting developers cheat. That accusation was false.
Those guidelines seek to promote a “pedestrian-friendly” downtown. The guidelines are part of Ordinance 4035, which governs downtown development. Without the ordinance, Camejo told me in April, the main downtown intersection—Palmetto Park Road and Federal Highway—“would look like Hillsboro Boulevard.” That would hardly be pedestrian-friendly.
I asked Camejo to explain. Here is his response:
“One of the original traffic conditions required dual left turns north and southbound at (Palmetto and Federal.) We had to reanalyze the traffic, and proposed a traffic management system that relied upon the new Mizner Boulevard and widened Dixie Highway to divert traffic away from U.S. 1 and Palmetto.”
The city didn’t examine such a system earlier, Camejo said, because of the need to get Mizner Park opened. The Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council had allowed the city to approve 1 million square feet of office-equivalent space downtown “without any additional traffic improvements.” If Boca Raton had not done that new analysis, “We would have been stuck with the original traffic conditions. . .If these turn lanes had been installed, it would have destroyed any prospect of a pedestrian-oriented downtown core.”
As City Manager Leif Ahnell said during the city’s recent three-day planning session, it will become increasingly harder to keep downtown Boca Raton walkable as downtown develops. Harder, however, doesn’t mean impossible. And Camejo’s story shows that the city has shown more flexibility and adaptation downtown than the city council’s regular critics suggest. Indeed, Boca Raton has been more flexible than the critics. After the June 13 presentation, the city will decide how to adapt again for the last phase of downtown development.
