By QUINTON SMITH/YahatsNew.com
YACHATS – Communication missteps, an overworked city manager, the need for staff, and more urgent issues are part of the reasons the Yachats city council last week paused the Parks & Commons Commission’s oversight of two key city buildings.
The Yachats city manager and two city council members met with the commission Tuesday to explain the council’s decision to temporarily remove the group’s oversight of the Yachats Commons and the Little Log Church Museum.
The commission has been busy working on plans and projects for two years during the coronavirus shutdown, but that work stalled when they forwarded them to an under-staffed city hall. While the city office is now filled with temporary staff, council members and Lambert say she is still overwhelmed dealing with daily issues, two lawsuits and related investigations, trying to determine staffing structure and personnel, the 2022-23 budget and myriad other operational problems.
“The city is not able to support the commission in the way they deserve to be,” she told the council last week before it voted unanimously to remove the two facilities from its oversight. “It’s not a productive place for us all to be.”
On Tuesday, Lambert met for the first time with the full commission along with councilors Ann Stott and Mary Ellen O’Shaughnessey to try to directly explain the issues and answer questions.
Lambert said that while some small items on the commission’s project list have been delayed, the city is proceeding with its pocket park proposal along Ocean View Drive, a greenspace proposal for the field behind city hall and a $1 million boardwalk overlooking the Yachats River.
She said three other city commissions also have projects, many of them involving large amounts of money and staff time.
“I want to be able to give my full attention to these projects and right now I cannot do that,” she said. “I hear you are frustrated with staffing. So am I.”
While work on the commission’s projects is proceeding slowly, Lambert said the hiring of a facilities/capital projects coordinator this summer should help get those moving – along with improved communication.
Stott, who has been the council’s liaison to the commission, said commission members began to independently pepper Lambert with emails, proposals and tasks from the moment she was hired in mid-February. Information from meetings between Lambert and former commission chair George Mazeika apparently did not get relayed to the commission before he resigned in April, vice chair Fran Morse resigned in May, and meetings of individual commissioners with the city manager did not clear up issues, frustrations or get Lambert’s “slow down” message.
Stott said she has twice asked the commission to slow its requests to the city manager.
“The welfare of this city is for us to have a functioning city manager so we can provide basic services,” Stott said. “I tried very, very tactfully to try to convey this … but there is more to this city than this commission. This is a polite way of saying ‘Stop’.”
The role of volunteers
Craig Berdie, who has been the most outspoken and critical of the city’s response to the commission’s requests, said the council’s vote to pause the group’s oversight “feels like a high degree of control.”
“We want to help, not to usurp anything,” said Berdie, who later in the meeting was elected commission chair. “What can we do to help get these things off your shoulders?”
Lambert mentioned that three bike racks from a commission project have been sitting in city hall for two months with no one to install them. A commission project to install delineators along U.S. Highway 101 needs a legal agreement with the state, she said, but it’s on the city attorney’s desk as he focuses on more urgent legal matters.
Yachats Trails member Joanne Kittel told Lambert that while the commission can’t do the city’s legal work, volunteers could easily make the concrete pads for the bike racks and install them.
“That’s the way things have gotten done in Yachats for years,” Berdie said.
Commission member Catherine Whitten-Carey said a seemingly simple agreement to commit the city to get proposals from a commission-vetted landscape architect for the greenspace project has been sitting unsigned for more than a month. And there’s confusion over communication on a list of tasks for a Waldport archeologist to check for various projects, including the pocket parks, so they can proceed.
Berdie said those two examples were evidence of a communication breakdown with city hall after the commission’s experienced volunteers have had extensive discussions with prospective vendors.
“This is the kind of thing we find frustrating,” he said. “ … we have done a lot of work, we have great expertise and then to be second-guessed, it’s frustrating.”
Lambert said better communication – and an understanding of the city’s larger issues — is the key.
“If you had a healthy city manager-commission chair relationship this may not have happened,” she said. “This is a miscommunication and we need to fix it.”
As part of that, Lambert told the commission that she is now working with Civil West Engineering of Newport to look at ways to either repair, remodel or replace the Little Log Church Museum, and that the Friends of the Little Log Church is asking for ways to reopen the museum portion of the facility. That follows a commission-approved report last year that recommended major remodeling costing at least $400,000 that was rejected by the city council.
Lambert and the city council want to form an advisory group of two council members, two Parks & Commons Commission members, someone from the Friends of the Little Log Church Museum and maybe another volunteer to iron out differences and help establish better communication. The commission appointed Michael Hempen and Adam Altson to be its representatives.
In answer to a question from Hempen, Lambert and Stott said they did not think the council’s “pause” of commission oversight of the Commons and museum would go beyond the end of the year.
“I’m just asking you to work with me on things on our plate,” Lambert said.
Hempen said the city of Yachats is “recovering from a long, difficult time” and urged the commission, the council and Lambert “to not dig our heels in here” but to untangle the process and get things working again.
“I don’t see any need to fight or bicker,” he said.
The council’s view last week
Until a recent go-ahead for engineering and design by the council, the Parks & Commons Commission was the main driver of a $940,000 boardwalk overlooking the Yachats River. It has also asked the city to proceed with designs to make over the grass field behind city hall, and is working with the trails group to develop three pocket parks along Ocean View Drive between West Fourth and Sixth streets.
The commission has also been proposing some immediate, basic repairs and long-range remodeling to the Commons, but most of those were pushed a few years farther out in the city’s recently revised capital improvement project process.
“The city is not aligned with this commission,” Lambert told the council last week before it voted to pause the commission’s oversight of the two facilities. “It’s no one’s fault” but the three projects are “taking a lot of administrative time and support.”
“And that’s the piece that I get frustrated with myself,” she said. “They take it personal. They think I’m neglecting them.”
Stott told the council last week that she believed the commission’s responsibilities were too broad and not more focused like the three other city commissions. She termed it “a big drain on the city manager’s time” and has created “a great deal of work for our city staff.” Stott urged the council to put facility details of the Commons and church/museum directly under Lambert to manage and have the Parks & Commons Commission focus on parks and trails.
“It makes sense for the city manager to be in charge of our facilities,” she said.
O’Shaughnessey said it was unfair for the council to put its new city manager – already buried in straightening out two years of city hall issues — in a position of suggesting changes to commission structures “that’s going to piss everyone off.” She suggested that two council members, two commission members, Lambert and maybe one other person begin meeting to work out the issues.
“Sit down and have a discussion,” O’Shaughnessey said. “I have trust in the Commons people. They’re smart, they’re passionate, they want to do the work.”
Too many chefs in the kitchen. They made a mess of Yachats City Hall. Why isn’t the city focusing on work force housing? What’s more important? Pocket parks and a boardwalk or housing for the people who serve these people?