In 10 years leading the Portland Water Bureau, David Shaff has received just two formal performance evaluations.

That's the rule for top Portland officials, not the exception.

More than two-thirds of Portland's 23 bureau directors - all earning at least $130,000 a year - have not received annual written evaluations despite a city policy requiring them, according to a review of city documents by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

That means taxpayers can't review the performance of public administrators who collectively earn about $3.8 million a year and oversee the equivalent of 5,600 full-time employees. The officials themselves acknowledge a sense of hypocrisy if subordinates receive reviews and they don't.

"I think it's problematic," said Anna Kanwit, Portland's human resources director. "Bureau directors should be evaluated."

It's not clear whether the problem extends beyond bureau directors to other white-collar city employees. Unlike a sampling of other government agencies, Portland doesn't track whether employees receive annual reviews - or even how many should get them.

The directors' evaluations that do exist offer key insights into the inner workings of city government. And though some human resources experts question the value of reviews, Kanwit and others say they're meaningful for employees when combined with ongoing, forward-looking feedback.

"People will perform better and be more engaged in the workplace," Kanwit said, "if they have a sense of how they're performing and there's an agreement about what are the goals for the next year."

Shaff declined an interview request but said in an email that, despite missing written reviews, he gets regular feedback in weekly meetings with Commissioner Nick Fish.

"The proof of that," wrote Shaff, who earns $199,160 a year and is retiring in August, "is that I am still here."

Why reviews aren't happening

Portland's political system is behind the spotty oversight. Portland is the biggest U.S. city without a lone top administrator, instead dividing oversight among the mayor and four commissioners.

Read the reviews

Read the most recent review for each director:

Mike Abbate

Amalia Alarcon de Morris

Susan Anderson

Ben Berry

Bryant Enge

Sam Hutchison

Dante James

Erin Janssens

Anna Kanwit

Thomas Lannom

Traci Manning

Dean Marriott

Carmen Merlo

Martha Pellegrino

Patrick Quinton

Mike Reese

Paul Scarlett

David Shaff

Lisa Turley

* No reviews at time of records request for Andrew Scott or Leah Treat. Tracy Reeve and Fred Miller were too new to have reviews as directors.

As a result, no one person is tasked with enforcing compliance, and five of the seven offices overseeing bureau directors are elected and answer only to voters.

Of the city's 23 bureau directors, 18 report to the elected mayor or four commissioners, four to the city's chief administrative officer, and one to the Portland Development Commission's appointed board.

The mayor and commissioners do a particularly poor job of keeping up, documents show. The Oregonian/OregonLive requested the past three performance evaluations for each bureau director - no matter the time period needed to produce three reports - to determine the frequency of reviews.

The results?

Of the 18 bureau directors who report to members of the City Council, only one received an annual review on schedule - and that employee, Sam Hutchison, is relatively new. (Two others were hired or promoted in 2014 and weren't yet eligible for reviews).

For the five directors who don't report to politicians? Four out of five received on-time reviews, according to records provided to The Oregonian/OregonLive at a cost of $407.92.

Commissioner Steve Novick, who took office in 2013, oversees the transportation, emergency management and emergency communications bureaus but has yet to complete a formal evaluation for any director.

"It's something that I knew was important," he said, "but tended to fall by the wayside in favor of things that had more immediate deadlines."

Novick said he's delighted with his directors' performance and acknowledged he should put that in writing. "We're the elected leaders," he said, "and people tend not to give us as much flak as they probably should."

Kanwit, HR director since 2012, agrees, saying she should have done more to enforce the rules. "In hindsight, that would have been a good idea," she said. "Would I take that more active role in the future? Yes."

Are they needed?

A sampling of other governments - the state of Oregon and Multnomah County - found uneven compliance under similar HR policies.

At Multnomah County, 646 managers and supervisors were supposed to have annual reviews in fiscal 2014. County spokesman David Austin reported 100 percent compliance.

"It's not difficult to track," he said, "because we make it a priority."

At the state, 28,966 employees should have received a review in fiscal 2014. Just 4,356 - or 15 percent - did.

"The low rate indicates to us that managers don't find the current check-the-box tool very useful," Matt Shelby, a spokesman for the Department of Administrative Services, said in an email. "Obviously, there's work to do on this front."

Portland's policy on reviews

For each non-represented employee and for certain unionized professional employees, bureaus will provide completed, written annual performance management plans to the Bureau of Human Resources. ...

"Chapter 9.02 Performance Management requires written performance management plans (i.e., performance evaluations) to be completed for each non-represented employee on an annual cycle determined by each bureau."

In Portland, city officials don't know how many employees receive annual reviews because their $47 million software system doesn't track it, Kanwit said. The city wanted to charge The Oregonian/OregonLive $320.76 just to tally the number of professional employees who should get them. A city salary database, however, indicates the city had about 3,000 such employees in fiscal 2014.

Kanwit said compliance is probably higher for those employees because raises must be accompanied by a review. Thirteen bureau directors are already at the top of their pay scale and aren't eligible for raises, meaning they don't have a financial incentive to press their boss for a review.

Regardless, not all HR professionals think evaluations are worth doing. Samuel Culbert - a UCLA professor and author of the 2010 book "Get Rid of the Performance Review!" - said they simply "aren't valid."

"It's one biased, imperfect person's reaction to another biased, imperfect person," he said. "But it's purported to be objective. You change the evaluator, you get a different evaluation."

But Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and author of "The People Factor," said annual reviews are important - if done right. They serve as a roadmap to employee development, she said, and enhance long-term performance.

"We should view every government employee not as a cost but as an investment," she said. "That is our capital."

Patrick Quinton, executive director at the Portland Development Commission since 2011, counts himself in the second camp. He has received a review every year and has pushed to make sure all PDC employees get them. The PDC's software system, separate from the city's, tracks progress.

Reviews are time-consuming for managers, Quinton said, but the consistency improved employee morale. "If they're honest and substantive," he said of reviews, "then I would certainly say it helps you do your job."

What the reviews show

In terms of government transparency, evaluations can shed light on the stars, the laggards, policy challenges and shifting political winds.

At the Office of Equity and Human Rights, created in 2012, director Dante James was praised by mayoral aide Josh Alpert in a December 2014 review as "invaluable" for helping create "a large piece of the Mayor's agenda for the next several years."

But James, in his self-evaluation, noted two big hurdles.

"Obstacles initially were the Mayor's silence on the importance and expectation of equity as well as a lack of personal engagement with me on this issue," he wrote. He also complained about a "seeming lack of willingness" by HR staff "to look at or understand the equity impacts" the bureau could have citywide.

Those obstacles, James reported, eventually were overcome.

The Parks Bureau director, meanwhile, showed a keen but tone-deaf interest in pay, according to a review completed in March 2014.

Mike Abbate, who joined the city in 2011, was described as a thoughtful and caring manager in the review by Commissioner Amanda Fritz. But he also asked that his salary be increased by $27,000, contending he was underpaid compared with other directors.

"Mike's repeated requests to move to a higher pay grade does not appear to reflect a political sensitivity within the Bureau," Fritz wrote. "Expecting a salary increase of over $20,000 at this time in this Bureau is unrealistic."

At least one bureau chief said she would like annual reviews.

Carmen Merlo, director of emergency management, hasn't had a formal evaluation since 2012.

"I pride myself in doing good work and doing the best job I can," Merlo said. "It's important for me to have more than just the 'attagirl' comment, but something in writing that documents that I did a good job."

Last July, Merlo asked Novick for feedback and received an informal 1 1/2-page write-up praising her command and candor. Merlo said she plans to push for a formal review this year.

"It isn't lost on me that I'm expected and required to do so for my employees," she said of annual reviews. "I have a similar expectation for my boss."

-- Brad Schmidt

503-294-7628

@cityhallwatch