Sarasota officials go without evaluations from commissioners

City Manager Tom Barwin is skeptical about the value of a typical performance evaluation.

That’s why, in his 2012 contract with the city, he included stipulations regarding how the City Commission’s annual review of his performance should be conducted. Per the contract, the city must bring in a third-party specialist to facilitate any evaluation.

“Performance reviews are a double-edged sword,” Barwin said. “If they’re done well, they can be very positive to an organization. If they’re done poorly, which most are, they’re problematic.”

But in more than three years as city manager, Barwin has yet to be formally evaluated by the City Commission.

The city charter states that the City Commission should conduct a review of the three charter officials — the city manager, city attorney and city auditor/clerk — on an annual basis, at least. But the commission hasn’t conducted any evaluations since 2011.

In late 2013, the commission began discussing how to carry out Barwin’s first review. Vice Mayor Suzanne Atwell was critical of the evaluation process, which asked commissioners to assess whether an official was performing above, at or below expectations in a series of categories.

“I think, historically, our evaluation process seemed to me to be kind of metric-oriented, quantitatively oriented, rather than perhaps more qualitatively oriented,” Atwell said.

After an early 2014 debate over whether citizens should participate in the review process, the momentum stopped without any of the evaluations being conducted. Barwin reached his second anniversary in office in September 2014. Soon after, the commission faced rapid turnover: Two commissioners resigned from their positions in November, and both interim commissioners appointed to their seats lost their elections in May 2015.

City Commissioner Susan Chapman says that turnover is at least partially responsible for the lack of formal reviews. She says that when new commissioners Shelli Freeland Eddie and Liz Alpert feel comfortable, she’d like for the board to revisit its conversations regarding the review process.

Although she’s never had the opportunity to participate in the process, she believes the annual evaluations would be a useful tool — particularly because it gives the commission a chance to openly discuss its views with one another. Still, she thinks there are ample opportunities to communicate with all three officials on a day-to-day basis.

“I am not one who thinks the annual evaluation is the most be all and end all,” Chapman said. “I think it’s important to tell people how you feel about certain issues as you go along.”

Alpert said it’s important to conduct the reviews to make sure the charter officials know where they stand. She agreed that the lines of communication between the commission and officials were satisfactory, though.

“I don’t have any complaint about any of them,” Alpert said. “I’ve been impressed, actually, with the charter officials and city staff in general.”

"Performance reviews are a double-edged sword." — Tom Barwin

Barwin said he meets weekly with each commissioner, which gives him a good sense of the board’s concerns and interests.

“I think this goes on each and every week,” Barwin said. “We have a candid exchange of ideas and reviews of city issues.”

City Attorney Robert Fournier and City Auditor and Clerk Pamela Nadalini also said they felt comfortable with the direction they were getting from the commission even in the absence of formal evaluations.

“My sense is the commissioners and myself have a pretty open dialog,” Fournier said. “If they needed something or felt something should be done in a different way, that would be communicated.”

Nadalini, who has gone through the review process twice, said she saw the feedback as helpful input — departing from the city manager’s stance that the evaluations could be problematic if not handled carefully.

“I can only speak from my vantage point, but I see evaluations being very useful tools in allowing us to make sure we’re performing and meeting our bosses’ expectations,” Nadalini said.

Despite not undergoing formal reviews, the commission has raised both Barwin and Nadalini’s  annual salaries in each of the last three years. The city compensates Fournier on an hourly basis and did not provide annual earnings for him by press time.