The Leader’s recent article regarding the evaluation of our city manager did everyone involved a disservice, including our community.

For decades, the value of anonymity in employee evaluations has been understood. Being anonymous makes the evaluator feel able to be honest and candid. When working with individuals that we like and generally approve of, it’s difficult to give negative feedback face-to-face.

Clearly, while recently evaluating our City Manager John Mauro, our city councilmembers believed that their comments would be anonymous, even to each other.

The Leader’s decision to cherry pick a few negative comments, and worse, confront our mayor about what he thought were confidential comments, will make it much harder for any meaningful feedback to be given in the future.

Moreover, the article was written in such a way to portray Mr. Mauro’s performance as mostly negative despite the fact that he actually received very high marks.

Evaluations are designed to help those being evaluated to grow professionally and become even more successful. A successful city manager creates a successful community.

Although your decision to request and print this information may possibly have been legal, the Revised Code of Washington and our Attorney General’s opinions related to confidentiality in executive session reviews of public employees make that questionable. It certainly wasn’t helpful for our community. The Leader can do better than this.

Rebecca Kimball
PORT TOWNSEND