PRGS

One of the Board committees I'm on is the Performance Review and Goal Setting Committee (PRGS); this is my second year on that committee. Last year, under the leadership of Beth Rosenthal, PRGS developed a new system and forms for evaluating department heads. This year, under Ed Lentz's leadership, we have begun a bi-annual evaluation process, which includes the Board committee that oversees the department, reviewing written assessments and meeting with department heads to go over them.

It's a bittersweet process: on one hand, most of our department heads are doing a great job with few resources, and we hate to divert any time or energy to engage them in a process which, essentially, tells them that. On the other hand, there are opportunities for improvement scattered around the group, and some of them are pretty important. So far, I think we have been able to address these areas needing improvement pretty well, and have developed some strategies that should lead to improvement.

I think that it's important that the citizens of the County know that we, the Board, are doing the often-difficult and uncomfortable – but essential – job of oversight, keeping track of the job performance of those professionals who are responsible for enormously varied work that the County does.

This process is also a way for us to get feedback from departments regarding how we're doing in the job of supporting those departments. During the interviews and document reviews, two pieces of feedback have consistently appeared. First, we hear that over the years, the Board has cut too many positions and this has threatened the mission of a number of departments. This second issue is the Board's tendency to micromanage departments and thus, in some cases, give department heads conflicting signals.

Both of these are true. However, I fear we will not be able to address these issues really effectively until the majority shifts to the party which feels that the Board should be engaged in longer term planning and goal-setting, and that we should leave the operation of the departments to the department heads.