The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
It’s déjá vu all over again. Back in January 2021, former Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry’s contract was renewed for four years. His salary was reduced a bit, but other than that nothing much else changed, except the Board of Supervisors added a performance review.
The newly elected supervisors couldn’t believe that in all the decades Mr. Huckelberry was the county administrator he never had a performance review. Supervisor Rex Scott acted to correct that glaring deficiency by motioning that future salary increases be based on an annual performance evaluation by the Board of Supervisors.
Ten months later when Mr. Huckelberry had that tragic bike crash there was no performance evaluation tool, nor any mechanism to determine his salary for the remaining three years of his contract.
The déjá vu part is that there is another highly paid government executive Farhad Moghimi, the executive director of Pima Association of Governments and the Regional Transportation Authority, who has not had a performance review since 2017.
Each of the 12 years I worked at PAG I received an annual performance evaluation by my supervisor using a questionnaire prepared by Human Resources. I also had to submit a self-assessment. Every employee at PAG got an annual performance review, except the executive director.
Moghimi’s 2017 contract requires a performance review every January to determine his annual salary increase. There was no review in 2018.
In January 2019 the Regional Council went into executive session for 13 minutes, supposedly to talk about the executive director, and came out with directions for PAG’s attorney to do what was discussed in executive session. No other information, including his contract, was shared with the public.
Those executive sessions ended in 2019. There was no executive session for Moghimi’s performance review again until August 2021. The Regional Council went into executive session for close to 90 minutes and came out with a motion that directed PAG staff, namely Moghimi, to develop a performance evaluation tool for the executive director.
Here’s the déjá vu part again. It’s a year later and there’s no performance evaluation tool in sight.
In January 2022, the Regional Council had a lengthy discussion about the performance evaluation tool developed by Moghimi and the members from Oro Valley and Sahuarita. It was a checklist of requirements standard for any metropolitan planning organization like PAG. Six of the 10 questions ask if the executive director “complies with” some type of regulation, board directive, or established policy. It reminded me of a performance evaluation tool for a cashier: Did you balance your drawer at the end of each day — yes or no?
Several members of the Regional Council recognized that there were several deficiencies with this tool, such as: is Moghimi a good leader, does he work well with others, is the organization achieving its mission, does he facilitate collaboration across jurisdictions, how is employee morale, etc. These are standard questions asked in any performance evaluation for a senior leadership position in the public sector.
General Ted Maxwell, the ADOT representative on the Regional Council, offered to prepare a more comprehensive performance evaluation tool called a 360 review for the Regional Council’s input. This is a common performance evaluation tool used to obtain feedback from employees, external organizations and partners, as was recently done for the performance review for the Tucson city manager. Maxwell talked about how effective this tool was when he served in the military, but he has failed to produce the simplest example.
It’s been a year since the original directive was made and there’s still no evaluation tool nor performance review. Moghimi controls hundreds of millions of transportation dollars for Pima County, he is leading the development of the next $2 billion RTA plan, and he’s paid with a lot of our tax dollars, so I for one want to know how he measures up and I want accountability, as should all taxpayers.
