By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
It wasn’t pretty.
It wasn’t very professional.
And it was contentious at times.
But by the end of a 3½-hour meeting Thursday, the Yachats City Council may have agreed on good enough terms to entice Gretchen Dubie to sign on to become its next city manager.
The council voted last month to have Mayor Leslie Vaaler and Councilor Ann Stott negotiate a contract with Dubie, a longtime Eugene nonprofit executive, to be city manager. After apparently agreeing on salary, negotiations stalled over the amount of vacation time Dubie should start with and how or if that might accrue over time.
Vaaler told the council Thursday that she and Stott couldn’t agree on how much vacation time to offer Dubie – from two or four weeks a year – and wanted the council to weigh in. Councilor Anthony Muirhead was absent.
Stott unsuccessfully sought to have the council go into executive (closed) session so that the vacation issues could be discussed without embarrassing Dubie or council members. Vaaler said the city attorney advised against that.
That level of detail is often handled by a recruitment firm and worked out before the job is even advertised. But to save $20,000 and have more control over the process, the Yachats council last spring decided to conduct a homemade search, but struggled for months to get under way.
Stott and Councilor Greg Scott said issues like vacation time and salary – the Yachats job posting also never mentioned a salary range – should have been decided before the search began.
“… we should have had this discussion in July,” Stott said. “It’s unfair to our candidate.”
Vaaler said the issues needed to be settled so they can meet with Dubie again, hopefully get an agreement, send it to the city attorney and have the council vote before its Dec. 15 meeting. If an agreement is reached, Dubie has asked to start Jan. 10 because of long-held plans to be out of town.
Vaaler said she thought the city manager should be treated like the union employees they oversee – and start at 10-12 days of vacation a year, earning more time the longer they are on the job. She also thought the city manager, like other employees who need their supervisor’s permission, should also get council OK before taking any time off.
But Stott and Scott said former manager Shannon Beaucaire had 18 vacation days in her contract and didn’t need permission to take them.
Once Councilor Mary Ellen O’Shaughnessey said it was wrong to offer Dubie less than what Beaucaire had and that she was comfortable adding two more days, the issue seemed to be settled.
But Vaaler pressed on, saying she had been uncomfortable with the amount of Beaucaire’s vacation time and that too much could harm the operation of the city. It wasn’t “fair to have lots of vacation time that affects other employees” and the operation of the city, she said.
That upset Stott and Scott even more, who said the Yachats has not had an experienced, professional manager before and that council debates like Thursday’s only harm the city’s reputation and “forget ever advertising nationally or regionally” for its next manager.
“We’ve spent seven months quibbling on minutiae,” Scott said. “I’m appalled. We’re basically saying that we don’t trust the person we’re hiring.”
Once they agreed to offer Dubie 20 vacation days a year, Scott, Stott and O’Shaughnessey pushed back against Vaaler’s suggestion that the city manager need council permission to take it.
“That’s micro-managing the city manager,” Stott said. “We’re hiring a professional.”
Scott said the mayor or council needed to be aware of when the city manager is taking vacation, but permission shouldn’t be needed. The council majority agreed.
The council also said planned to do quick check-in evaluations at three and six months and then yearly evaluations after that. There would be not cost-of-living salary increase in 2022, they agreed. But Scott said – and others seemed to agree – that a bump in salary or a bonus could be discussed next fall if the council was happy with Dubie’s performance.
Scott ended the council’s discussion by saying that despite the turmoil in the recruitment, selection and negotiating process, the council’s decision could be a game changer for Yachats.
“This is a very important decision,” he said. “This is our Barack Obama moment … moving us in a special direction with professional management.”
Dubie was listening in on much of the online session. In a “chat” area on the Zoom meeting she typed the council a simple message: “Thank you for all your tremendous thought and consideration. I appreciate it.”
In other business Thursday, the council:
- Awarded seven additional days of bereavement leave to longtime public works employee Russ Roberts, whose wife recently died suddenly and unexpectedly. The city’s union contract authorizes three days leave for deaths of immediate family members.
- Received a recommendation from the Public Works and Streets Commission to delay purchase and installation of automatic gates on Gimlet Lane on Horizon Hill because the cost had increased to $75,000 from an estimated $35,000.
- Gave street supervisor Rick McClung the go-ahead to negotiate with the Oregon Department of Transportation the installation of “delineators” along the west side of U.S. Highway 101 from Yachats River Road to the north side of the Yachats River bridge to help pedestrian and bicycle safety.
- Heard a presentation from Yachats resident Tom Kerns on why the city should declare a climate emergency and develop a climate action plan.
The key moment in the meeting was the discovery that some council members assumed the personal manual applied to the city manager. It does not. The personal manual is the contract for other city employees. The city manager has a different contract that spells out contractual items like benefits and the severance process.
It is important to understand that the city manager is largely a “people” job. So good people skills are the most important element in predicting success. I believe Gretchen Dubie has the potential to be a great leader.
I’d like to hear more about Yachats resident Tom Kerns’ proposal on why the city should declare a climate emergency and develop a climate action plan. What is his proposal, and what was the outcome of his presentation? Thanks!