By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
YACHATS – Wednesday’s Yachats City Council meeting was probably not the way councilors wanted to show new city manager Heide Lambert how they operate.
Just three days into her job, Lambert was thrust into the middle of a procedural mess and yet another long-running disagreement over proposed repairs to the city-owned Little Log Church Museum.
Just minutes into its meeting, the council was lambasted by museum board member and former councilor James Kerti for taking six weeks to try to write a letter to a Eugene contractor asking him to estimate costs to repair the church.
It returned to the subject for the last 45 minutes of the meeting, debating who tried to do what and why, and only added to the confusion and finger-pointing. Finally, Councilor Ann Stott made a motion – and then amended it twice — reiterating the council’s intent to get an original letter approved by the city attorney and mailed off.
The letter – with suggested wording from Larry Thornton, a Yachats engineer helping guide the repair project — was authorized by the council in a 4-1 vote Jan. 6. It was following the recommendation of the city’s Parks & Commons Commission.
McClain Construction of Eugene said it needed a letter showing the city’s intent to proceed with repairs – and that asking for estimates would satisfy that request. It needed the letter in January, the company said, to get the project on its busy summer construction schedule, should the city agree to go ahead and if it was the winning bidder.
But somewhere along the line interim city manager Katherine Guenther and Mayor Leslie Vaaler thought they were committing the city to proceed with repairs – not just get a cost estimate. In January, Vaaler was the lone no vote against getting the repair estimate.
“Honestly, as a (museum) board we were sick to our stomachs that the letter had not been sent,” Kerti told the council Wednesday.
He termed the effort by Guenther and Vaaler “really disheartening” and called the letter they wrote unclear and “grossly inadequate.”
Later in the meeting, Parks & Commons Commission chair George Mazeika called their re-written letter “totally useless.”
Letter confusion
When the council returned to the subject near the end of the 2 1/2 hour meeting, Lambert said she spent much of her time Tuesday and Wednesday researching details and asked for “grace and patience” to catch up on the issue which stretches back three years.
But Stott and Councilor Anthony Muirhead said Lambert should have not been placed in the position of trying to fix something the council had approved a month earlier.
“Heide is really caught in a bind here,” she said. “On Jan. 6 we had a vote that was very clear as to what we were requesting.”
Then Stott read into the council record Thornton’s letter “so everyone is clear” it only asked the contractor to do a structural engineering report that would estimate costs.
Vaaler said that she had “multiple discussions” with Guenther over the interim city manager’s concerns with the proposed letter. She also listened to a recording of the Jan. 6 meeting, which she said had a motion with “vague language.” Vaaler said Guenther then told her she did not have time to listen to the recording or re-work the letter, so the mayor took on that chore with the help of Councilor Mary Ellen O’Shaughnessey.
After that explanation, Vaaler said the city “should not be taking its legal advice from Larry Thornton.”
But Mazeika said the city should have consulted with its attorney soon after the council’s Jan. 6 vote if there were concerns.
“I don’t know who got scared,” he said. “But I’m extremely disappointed … and I know Heide is blown away by this.”
Muirhead said Lambert shouldn’t be asked to explain “why we didn’t send the letter a month ago.”
After more discussion, the council voted unanimously to approve Stott’s motion to have Lambert consult with the city attorney and send a letter as soon as possible that asks McClain for a structural engineering report.
At the end of that vote and sprinkled throughout the meeting were comments from councilors acknowledging a tumultuous 12 months with two interim managers and a chronically under-staffed city hall operation.
While later praising Guenther for holding city hall together since May, Councilor Greg Scott said during a discussion with Lambert that after re-joining the council a year ago he had learned “that this is where you come to see passions die.”
At one point in the meeting, Stott brought up a list of shortcomings, including that the city had not contracted with a municipal judge it had authorized a year ago, failed for weeks to sign a contract so a contractor could proceed with painting the interior of the Commons, and asked a second time for a discussion about contracting with someone to chase county, state and federal infrastructure grants.
“It’s disappointing that we are disappointing people,” O’Shaughnessey said at one point.
At the end of the meeting, Vaaler announced that Lambert had asked that city hall be open only 2-4 p.m. daily until she can get staff organized and “so they can make progress on certain tasks.”
- Quinton Smith, a longtime Oregon journalist, is the founder and editor of YachatsNews.com and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com