By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
YACHATS – For the first time in more than a year, Yachats city hall was fully staffed this week.
Although the office will remain closed to the public until April 4, this week a receptionist was answering the phones and sorting emails and the planner was planning. A new events coordinator was getting familiar with the Commons, and the accounts receivable clerk was being formally trained to process utility and other bills.
“We’re up and running this week, but we have to do it for a while to see if it works,” said city manager Heide Lambert, who is in the sixth week of her job. “All of these people have a lot of potential and want to be in these jobs a long time.”
Yachats city hall was in chaos much of 2021 because the city had three managers or interim managers, and staff departed and weren’t replaced.
At one point interim city manager/planner Katherine Guenther and administrative assistant Dayna Capron were left to do most every city hall-related chore, including handling utility billing after the December departure of longtime deputy city recorder Kimmie Jackson.
It reached its nadir when Capron was out for more than a week in February, there was no trained backup and utility bills were two weeks late in going out – resulting in a flood of calls and emails to the city.
Lambert and her crew hope most of that trauma is behind them – although there will be kinks to work out and duties to fine tune or change.
Beginning April 4, Lambert plans a “soft opening” of city hall as staff continues to learn and train. The lobby and drive-through will be open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays but closed for lunch from noon to 1 p.m. Lambert and Guenther are available by appointment.
The first task in the ongoing reorganization, Lambert said, was to sit down and write down a list of essential work that had to be done, work that should be done and other work that they wanted to get done. Those were divided into groups and then sorted into positions. Each major position will have a trained backup.
Except for Lambert, Guenther and Capron, all the personnel have been hired as temporary staff through an employment agency. Once duties, actual work and the time required become clearer, Lambert said, she will create full or part-time city positions.
Some of the reorganization plans will not fully proceed until Jackson lets the city know if she is returning to work. Currently on medical leave, Jackson notified the city in January she intends to sue for race discrimination, hostile work environment, retaliation and defamation.
Here’s who’s doing what:
- Planning: Guenther has returned to her full-time planning job, which often took a back seat when she was interim city manager for nine months. She’s now attacking a backlog of building plans and proposals. “She wants to be there,” Lambert said of Guenther. “She’s happy to be there.”
- Finance: Continuing to contract with Janet Cline, who works remotely from Colorado, to handle overall accounting; Capron handles accounts receivables and is the office manager; Diana Grover of Yachats was hired part-time to deal with accounts payables. All will be cross-trained to fill in for each other when needed.
- Facilities: Neal Morphis, who has been working on a temporary contract since mid-2021, is facilities manager, working on “everything outside of city hall,” Lambert said. That includes all city buildings but also working with water supervisor Rick McClung on grants and contracts.
- Events: Michelle Stout of Yachats has been hired part time to help with city-related events and management of the Commons. “I took a leap of faith to hire an events person to really give better focus back to the Commons and help bring it back (from the 2-year pandemic closure),” Lambert said. “She’s hands on and the go-to person to take some pressure off the Parks & Commons Commission.”
- Receptionist: Ashley Tough is working full-time as the city hall receptionist, handling walk-ins when the building reopens, answering phones and emails and other administrative duties.
Still lots of catchup
There is still a ton of organizational catch up and work to do, Lambert says, and it could be months before larger projects – with council approval – proceed.
During her first week, Lambert landed in the middle of a strong push by the Parks & Commons Commission and unclear direction by the council on how – or if — to proceed with plans to repair the Little Log Church Museum. She’s now re-setting the process by contracting with the city’s outside engineering company, Civil West of Newport, for $2,700 to do an engineering assessment of the building and suggest a path forward.
“These guys are local, they do work on the coast and they’re doing our boardwalk plans,” she said. “I don’t see the building blowing over in a windstorm. Yes, I want to repair it. I want to renovate it. But I want to know more …”
The city no longer has a contract with TCB Security Services of Newport for code enforcement. Morphis and Stout are learning those duties and will split that work until Lambert can get a better handle on enforcement issues and the work involved. Morphis is handling vacation rental licensing, inspections and complaints.
Lambert has also convinced the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office to send a social worker to the Yachats area once a week as part of its “assisted diversion” program that tries to deal with low-level criminal activity that may be more connected to mental illness, homelessness, addictions and other behaviors.