By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
The paving of the newly-named La de da Lane behind Yachats City Hall is tentatively moving ahead, after the City Council voted 3-1 this week to spend $4,000 to proceed with bids for it.
Newly elected Councilor Greg Scott tried to halt the estimated $160,000 project Thursday, saying it was not needed, lacked enough public discussion, did not go through the city’s capital improvement process, was distracting staff, and that the city doesn’t need more parking.
“To me this is a flawed project from the beginning,” Scott said.
Mayor Leslie Vaaler and Councilors Mary Ellen O’Shaughnessey and Ann Stott quickly disagreed.
The plan to pave the 100-yard stretch of street between the Yachats Commons and West Sixth Street was first presented a year ago, taking advantage of a $100,000 grant from the Oregon Department of Transportation. It went largely unnoticed until it reached the former City Council in July, when Vaaler and O’Shaughnessey balked at its size or cost.
Debate went back and forth through the summer. There were public hearings before three city commissions and at least two council workshops where dozens of citizens listened or weighed in with opinions and ideas.
The council approved a much-scaled back project in September, and asked the city’s engineer to prepare drawings and get ready to advertise for bids.
The new plans narrows the street to allow two-way traffic but on one, wider lane, has one sidewalk that separates the skate park from the street, and unmarked parking – all within the same footprint of the current deteriorating asphalt road and parking area. The plan also calls for ways to close of the street by using removable barriers and possibly using permeable asphalt, depending on its cost.
Once the project was halted last summer, Vaaler, O’Shaughnessey and Stott said Thursday, there was lots of community input and the new design reflected the best ideas from that.
“It makes sense to go forward with this, keeping the enthusiasm for this and keeping it within the amount of the grant,” Vaaler said, acknowledging she changed her original opposition after the city went back and got community comments and asked for a significant redesign based on those ideas.
Once the city gets bids, it must still review them and determine if it wants to move ahead with the project in the late spring. There is still some uneasiness on the council about what could be the cost of the project and if the city’s request to have a secondary bid for permeable pavement would add significantly to the price tag.
In other business Thursday, the council:
- For the third time sent a proposed lighting ordinance back to the Planning Commission to work out last-minute issues raised by the city’s attorney on regulating marine lighting. Commision members earlier in the week expressed frustration on not only about the attorney’s opinion but that it came after it had spent more than a year working on the ordinance and had twice made council-requested tweaks to it.
- Learned from community services director Heather Hoen that the city has developed an inventory and location of all Central Lincoln PUD streetlights. “We can not only have them turned off but we can have them moved,” Hoen said. The council asked staff to develop a policy for a procedure to handle neighborhood requests to turn them off, shade or move them.
- After criticizing the city’s approach to code enforcement a week earlier, asked questions of TCB Security operations manager Matt Frank of his approach to handling the city’s 16-hour-a-week code enforcement contract. But the council had no staff report on the details of TCB’s contract, including cost, days of the week, duties, requirements, reporting issues, and what the city’s expectations were, but seemed satisfied with his responses.
- Approved a request for the Library Commission to sign up to access a statewide online library that would add 90,000 items accessible to cardholders. The service was one of the many recommendations made recently by a consultant who studied the library’s operations and expansion plans. Friends of the Library, a nonprofit support group, hopes to get a $10,000 grant to pay for two years of service. “It’s a great program … my only question is ‘Why didn’t we do this sooner?’ ” said Scott.
As someone who has only been paying close attention to the goings-on in Yachats for a little over a year, I’m struggling to understand why residents rather overwhelming supported such a dramatic change in the Council makeup during the last election. By all accounts, the city has been run very well, and is on solid financial footing even with the economic impacts of the pandemic.
I’m concerned by some of the statements I’ve seen from the new councilors and mayor. In this specific article, Councilor Scott pushing back on La de da Lane improvement project is particularly concerning. I don’t know how much the city currently has in it’s coffers (I’m sure I could find the figure somewhere) but the parting statement by the previous mayor indicated that the city was being left with $2.5 million more than he started his term with, so I assume the number is something north of that $2.5 million. If that is the case then it was ludicrously obstructionist of Councilor Scott to deem the project unnecessary, which would have been a terrible waste of a $100,000 grant and all the time, effort and financial resources that had already gone into planning the project.
I’ve also been disappointed to see that the city manager has essentially been run out of town. I don’t blame her for wanting to find a working environment where she didn’t have to deal with a hostile council whose primary policy position was their desire to handcuff and micromanage her every decision. It seems like those on the council right now don’t understand, or don’t appreciate, how a city manager/council form of government operates. The city manager should have the flexibility and support to make staffing decisions. I trust a full time, professional city manager to have a firm enough grasp on the city budget to know how much the city can afford to pay in staffing costs. Of course I think it’s important for the city council to have an oversight role, but I haven’t seen any evidence to support the assertion that the city can’t afford to staff the positions that were requested.
Yachats residents understandably have high expectations for their local government. Yachats is a special place and it’s important to have people in place who understand that and work hard to maintain and improve upon the areas that make Yachats so special. Which is why I don’t understand why so many residents seem to have supported a new government that is intent on throwing up roadblocks any time someone suggests spending a penny to help the community grow. I could understand the position of the new council if Yachats was on the verge of municipal bankruptcy but it seems that the opposite is the case.
I hope the new council understands that progress and growth sometimes means opening up the checkbook. Fiscal responsibility, communication and transparency are vitally important, everyone can agree on that, but the council can’t focus on those details so fanatically that they prevent anything from getting done.