Council Member Rich Olver graciously sat down with us on December 22, to talk about the recent meeting where he was muted during discussions regarding incentives for the Lakewood City Manager.

I have cut the video into a couple parts for viewability. Both contain information and news for Lakewood, Colorado

Part 1: How the job is going and other tidbits about how the City Council and the City of Lakewood Colorado works

Part 2: The December meetings about the City Manager incentives where Councilors were muted

Notable remarks from Rich:

• I prefer to be called Rich
• My first paying job, when I was 14 and I was from dairy country so I got a job on a dairy farm. One of the things I had to do was curry the cows. If you aren’t familiar that’s like cleaning them. Basically they poop and lay down in it and it’s all over their backsides. Someone has to clean that off. So anyway that was not the best job in the world to start with. But I’d have to go with, this one’s worse.
• I wanted to come in and talk to parks department and talk to them about future dog parks. And I did do that when I was a candidate. And that was allowed. But when I tried to do that as a Councilor, well the first time I just got blown off, and the next time I met with the City Manager I said “I think you are just blowing me off here” and the response was, “well we don’t want councilors coming in and talking to staff at staff meetings when they are discussing real issues”.
• I believe it’s the city department heads that are actually setting policy.
• What really happened [at the annual retreat] was that they went with big umbrella ideas [sustainability]. Then [city staff] can say they did the check box and say they are doing [Lakewood City] council’s priorities right now. It didn’t matter what we had said, they were already going to be able to check that box. And so we really didn’t have much influence over what was going to happen this year. We had some, a little bit. But the reality is that the priorities are set by the department heads and whoever sets the projects that people are going to work on. 
• I totally came into this thinking that I would be joining a team. And boy I was wrong about that. Although staff itself might be a team. Council itself is not part of a team.

“They said that, in the May meeting,  the Mayor and Mayor pro tem should do the renegotiation.

Only those two would do the negotiations for the contract, for the contract modifications. It was only a small piece of the contract and some oversight.
They took away a lot of oversight.

…it’s the number one job we have [to oversee the City Manager and contract]”

Rich Olver

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• One of the reasons that they kept it to two people, was to keep it secret.
• Because they talk about, “It’s a personnel thing. We can’t have people saying bad things about the City Manager, because that’s defamation and she can sue us.”
• So they decided instead of  keeping things out in public, to hide everything and that meant to hide everything you only have two people and on the other hand this is the most important thing we do we need more people, we need at least six, but then you can’t have six because then you’d have to publish and let in anyone that wants to go. It’s a bit of a system that’s broken.
• The org chart starts with citizens, then Council, then the City Manager and then it branches out to everybody. Well that’s what the org chart shows but the reality is that citizens are over here and the City Manager is [off to the side] with branching off from her.
• We were supposed to go into this executive session for an hour, see the document and come up with any ideas to change it. Talk about a last minute thing. We needed to see it ahead of time to say this is a good idea.

“Charlie started the comments and he paused and the Mayor muted him and recognized someone else to talk.

…the floor should have come back to me, so I started speaking so he muted me and went to the next person.
it went back to Charlie and then the Mayor muted him two minutes into his talk and passed the floor to me. The Mayor interrupted me several times and he muted me several times

[The mayor] has done this many times to Councilor Springsteen, and no one has really spoken up when he has done that to her.”

Rich Olver

So if the people change the people on Council so that the minority, of which I’m a part of, became the majority, then we could change the contract back to something a little more reasonable.

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Other updates (See the end of Part 2 for this discussion):

• City of Lakewood is a bedroom community that should involve more Councilors and better planning so in places like Rooney Valley so we don’t have a home desert with no commercial services.
• Denver Federal Center sale has not closed. The buyers asked for two extensions and is not looking to close at the end of January.