By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews
YACHATS – A city council discussion – and at least one proposal – to change how three city commissions operate stalled last week when one member said it was inappropriate for the lame duck council to decide the issue this month.
The five-member council is getting two new members in January – both of whom have served on the commission called out by name Thursday by the city manager and one councilor as being the most difficult to deal with.
Parks & Commons Commission chair Craig Berdie was elected mayor in December, defeating councilor Ann Stott, and commission member Catherine Whitten-Carey was one of two elected in a three-way council race. Both campaigned, in part, on projects from various commissions being slowed or stopped by city hall or the council.
City manager Heide Lambert has been struggling to understand and deal with the functions of the commissions since beginning her job nine months ago. For at least two years the commissions took on outsized roles in proposing and working on projects and city facilities during the time when there were two interim city managers and little city staff.
Oregon law requires the city to have a Planning Commission. But Yachats also has three others — Parks & Commons, Public Works & Streets and a Library commission. It also has committees on emergency preparedness and finance, but those are different in authority and structure.
The commissions have been around for years — before Yachats went to a council/city manager form of government in 2016 – and were originally meant to do much of the work that department heads in larger organizations might do. But the city has had three permanent managers and two interim managers since then and there is constant turnover on commissions.
That issue worsened during the pandemic when commissions – especially Parks & Commons — kept actively working to deal with facility issues or to propose projects that then languished because of lack of direction, city staff or council attention or approval.
“Commissions are doing work and then being frustrated by the council or staff,” Lambert said. “The relationship between the council and commissions is disconnected. It’s my job to connect them …”
Lambert asked the council last Thursday to discuss conflicts between how Yachats’ municipal code defines the roles of the commissions and the council-approved rules for the three.
“Yes, what I’d like to talk about is changing the structure of the commissions,” Lambert said in answer to a question from Stott.
Lambert initially asked the council Thursday to discuss the conflict between city code and commission rules and “maybe change it later in the month.” But later in the hour-long discussion Lambert said she was not asking for a “vote today” but “the code is a mess and needs to be dealt with.”
Anthony Muirhead, who was appointed to the council in 2021 and came in third in the November election, said Lambert laid out the issue with commissions “very well” and that he hoped “everyone is town is listening.”
But he said it would be inappropriate for the current council to make changes this month because “voters made their choice” by electing two members of the Parks & Commons Commission to the council.
Praise the work of volunteers
Lambert, Stott and councilor Mary Ellen O’Shaughnessey went out of their way to praise volunteers for working on city commissions and committees and placed some of the issue on city staffing issues the past two years.
“They’re doing some very important work,” Stott said.
The council earlier this year pulled oversight of the Commons and Little Log Church Museum from the Parks & Commons Commission because it felt the commission continued to push projects, make demands on staff and was struggling to work with Lambert. Before that – in July 2021 — the council voted to remove the chair of the commission because she was interfering with staff and not following city policies. The commission has since had three different chairs.
Stott said in addition to the commission not following its mission, most current problems have “to do with people and personalities and assuming they have more authority over what’s going on in the city that what they have.”
“I honestly believe we need to start from scratch,” Stott said, by removing commission authority from the city’s codes and re-doing their rules.
There was a bit of discussion about training for both commission members and councilors on their roles, and whether the council or commissions should write “charge letters” defining their tasks. Stott asked Lambert if the council – not commissions – should create those
“Yes,” Lambert said. “But they don’t follow them. Several of them have their own ideas of what they want to do.”
“We need some sort of re-boot,” she said. “The idea is to get re-started and do something.”
Lambert said she believes much of the problem is that the commissions are focused on pushing along projects, not overseeing policy in their areas.
“The bottom line is projects,” she said. “If the commissions were dealing with just policy there would be no issues. That’s where the problem lies. We have too many projects on the table right now.”
Commission vacancies
The Parks & Commons Commission is facing a bit of a crossroads as well. It is supposed to have seven members, but there are two vacancies and Berdie and Whitten-Carey are leaving to join the council next month. That leaves three members – Michael Hempen, Dean Schrock and Adam Altson – and not enough members for a quorum to officially conduct business.
It’s a topic of the commission meeting Tuesday.
Council workshops are normally for councilor members only to discuss issues, but Mayor Leslie Vaaler invited Berdie to offer his thoughts.
Berdie said it was appropriate for the council and commission to clarify their roles and relationships, but said it’s not unusual or necessarily bad to have push-and-pull between the two. He said commission members can be smart, talented and bring “experience and expertise” that city staff may not have.
Berdie said he hears Lambert’s frustration about projects, but suggested commissions, staff and council work more to find out “what’s causing the frustration and what can be done about it.”
“Clarification is appropriate,” Berdie said. “But I’m reluctant to throw everything out. There’s plenty to talk about … but given the lame duck nature of this council, this is not appropriate.”
- Quinton Smith is the editor of YachatsNews.com and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com