By GARRET JAROS/YachatsNews
WALDPORT – Developing a piece of property in Waldport just got easier while un-developing a piece of property just became possible after the city council approved changes to its municipal code.
In a flurry of decision making during its March 14 meeting, the Waldport city council also approved a dog area for the new Southworth Park, denied a requested road closure for June’s Beachcomber Days, and chose a new newspaper of record.
Councilors also learned the price for law enforcement is going up, which means Waldport will need to ante up $400,000 if it wants to continue having two Lincoln County Sheriff’s deputies patrol the city.
City manager Dann Cutter met with Sheriff Curtis Landers just days before Thursday’s meeting in what he called a “heart-to-heart” where the sheriff laid out what amounts to an 11 percent increase — if the council chooses to continue the contract July 1.
The city of 2,300 currently pays $366,831 a year to contract with the department to have deputies Doug Honse on days and Abby Dorsey on nights for a combined 80 hours a week.
“Sheriff Landers is between a rock and a hard place,” Cutter told the council. “This is not them looking at Waldport as a cash cow. This is the cost.”
Siletz and Depoe Bay also saw an increase in their contracts, Cutter said, and the sheriff’s office is in negotiations with the deputies’ union so it may still face a big cost increase. The sheriff’s office also had the overhead it pays to Lincoln County increase from 13 percent to 17.1 percent.
“That means we are paying $50,000 on top of the sheriff’s contract to the county,” Cutter said. “It goes to the county for their overhead.”
The county taking its cut is an “absolutely normal practice,” Cutter explained, and the increase simply reflects the price of everything going up over time.
“It’s bleeding all across the board and (Landers) is in a tough place, but unless they go out and take a swing at a levy, I don’t know how we solve this problem,” Cutter said. “It’s tough. It was a tough, earnest conversation between us just commiserating on the fact that every single thing is just going up and how do you solve it with limited resources.”
But $400,000 is more than 50 percent of what Waldport is forecast to collect in property taxes in fiscal 2024-25 and is the single largest expenditure in the city budget. But it is still far less than resurrecting its former police force and station, which was shuttered in 1998.
“It would be prohibitively expensive to create our own police department,” Cutter said in response to a councilor’s question. Cutter told YachatsNews previously that when the city force was disbanded “we had over a dozen lawsuits and it was costing significantly more that it would be to contract with the sheriff’s office.”
The council invited Landers to attend its April meeting to discuss the increase.
Development and un-development
The council approved modifying its municipal code that deals with system development charges, which are fees charged to new development within the city. The changes were broken down into three parts.
The first piece sets a rate of 9 percent a year if a resident chooses to pay their charges in installments over a 10-year period. Waldport currently calculates bases its interest on what it gets from a state investment pool plus 2 percent.
“Right now we have a variable interest rate that makes it difficult over time to calculate,” Cutter said. “What we are asking for is a fixed rate so everyone will know exactly what the cost is over 10 years.”
The second piece allows a developer to pay the charges after a property is sold or rented. Those charges are currently assessed prior to any development.
“This is where really, at the end of the day, we have been talking about what we can do to help a developer build and develop a piece of property,” Cutter told the council. “From the city’s perspective it doesn’t matter if they write that check at the beginning of the project or at the end of the project.”
Deferring a payment would allow a developer of multiple units to forgo paying in advance what could be a prohibitive amount and create a deferment through a lien on the property.
Councilor Susan Woodruff then raised the subject of people on the 10-year plan who are delinquent in their payments.
“The ones that we have done it for are all in arrears right?” Woodruff asked.
“Right now, unfortunately, we have three of them,” Cutter said. “We reached out to our attorney and even though our contract says that after 90 days we can take action, Oregon law says that we have to wait a year.”
The third amendment would allow properties that were once developed to be registered as un-developed to stop piling up water and sewer charges. The way it stands now, once a property is developed and a meter is set, water and sewer charges begin. And they don’t stop – no matter if a house burns down or slides down a hill (both actual examples in Waldport) and there are no foreseeable plans to rebuild.
“In the code and in the law there’s no way of magically un-developing a property,” Cutter said. “So what I am proposing is that we effectively codify a way for us to un-develop a property legally.”
If the property were to be developed in the future however, system development charges would be assessed anew.
The council agreed to all three modifications – but also agreed it would be up to the council to decide whether to approve an un-development request.
System development charges for a single dwelling unit are currently $10,499. The base monthly rate for sewer and water is about $90 a month.
Changes to the code will go into effect April 1.
Newspaper of record
The council also approved YachatsNews as the city’s newspaper of record.
Local governments are required to choose a newspaper of record to publish public notices. Waldport had used the Newport News Times but with its recent changes in ownership and name to the Lincoln County Leader, Waldport staff used the opportunity to review the most effective method of getting required legal notices to the public.
But the issue was more complex than expected, Cutter said, because while a 2023 change in state law allows for a local government to use a digital-only news site to publish its public notices it also requires the site have subscribers.
“However, YachatsNews is a free service,” Cutter said. “It is not a subscriber-based service. In my opinion, and several other city managers that I polled, it seems to be with a free service everyone is a de facto subscriber since there is no fee. Everyone is subscribing by participating in reading.”
Councilors noted that YachatsNews has regular contributors as well as an ongoing presence at city meetings. In addition, the Lincoln County Leader can only be accessed online through a paywall.
Cutter also said that readership numbers provided by YachatsNews are “substantially higher than I think the Lincoln County Leader by a far stretch.”
Council members agreed. Councilor Rick Booth added he would rather go with the newspaper that is locally owned and has been around the longest. YachatsNews began publishing in 2019 and became a 501c3 nonprofit in 2022. The Newport News Times was purchased in 2023 by Salem-based Country Media.
In other business
- In a change of heart from previous designs, a citizen-requested dog park was approved for the east side of the new Southworth Park. The roughly 120- by 220-foot area will have fencing along the west side that can roll back during Beachcomber Days and timber events.
- A request to close Cedar Street for the 68th Waldport Beachcomber Days “Waves & Wonder” event in June was denied because council had requested representatives attend its meeting to discuss concerns but no one showed.
- Garret Jaros is YachatsNews’ full-time reporter and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com