A new mayor and two Yachats City Council members were sworn into office Wednesday, creating a new majority and possibly heading the group in a different direction.
John Moore, a retired banker who also ran for mayor in 2016, succeeds Gerald Stanley, who did not run for re-election. The two new council members are James Kerti, a web developer and planning commission and budget committee member, and Leslie Vaaler, a retired college professor.
Leaving the council were Barbara Frye, an incumbent who finished third behind Kerti and Vaaler in the November general election and Craig Berdie, an interim member appointed last summer after Greg Scott resigned.
Although familiar with Yachats issues and procedures, the new council members recently attended a League of Oregon Cities seminar to help familiarize them on public meetings and records law and municipal topics. City manager Shannon Beaucaire also created a binder containing the city charter, council rules, 2018 goals, various planning documents and a League of Oregon Cities folder on “the basics of local government.”
Below is a question-and-answer session that YachatsNews.com conducted with Moore.
Question: The first question looks back then we’ll look forward. Tell folks your thoughts about running for election in a small but very involved community. Reflections?
Answer: A small community like ours relies heavily on volunteers, which is why I got active with different commissions and committees in the first place — I wanted to be a part of this community. The more you get involved here the more you realize how interconnected we all are in almost every aspect of life in Yachats. Certainly, serving on any City Council is often viewed as a thankless job, and one that leaves you open to criticism for many of the council decisions — but presiding over council meetings is something I can do and we have a need for a mayor who can react calmly and rationally to the issues brought to the council. Unlike my run two years ago, this time I had a track record of service to the city and that helped a lot.
Q: Speaking of meetings. There has been concern about meetings that go 3-4 hours, lack focus, seem to wander off course and end up without a clear result, leading to frustration or confusion. How can you, or do you, focus the meetings and end up as often as possible with a clear direction?
A: That describes the council meetings this last year very well. It’s the mayor’s job to control the meetings and keep everyone on the council focused on the agenda, item by item. Ideally, every agenda item should result in a decision by the council — not any particular planned decision, but a group decision that’s in the best interest of the community. I plan to keep the council focused and on topic during our meetings. If a new topic is brought up under public comments and the council wants to discuss it further, then we’ll schedule it for a future agenda — not the current meeting. By staying focused, the meetings should move along at a much better pace, be considerably shorter and more productive.
Q: Last year the council spent a lot of time (and two facilitated meetings) wrestling with understanding the roles under the council-city manager form of government and trying to make it work. It seemed to be an entirely new concept for the council, yet nearly every city in Oregon operates that way. What’s your view of council-manager roles and how do you help continue the transition?
A: I expect the new council will fully complete the transition to a council-manager form of government and do it fairly quickly. For most of the last two years the majority of the council had served under our old structure. With our new council, only has one member has served under the former structure. Most of my life, I have lived in cities with a council-manager form of government and I’m quite comfortable with the way it’s intended to work. The hardest part has been getting council members to let go of the control of things that are rightfully the responsibility of the city manager.
Q: In 2018 the council also spent a lot of time trying to identify and agree on goals. The last list in October had 12 goals with multiple directions on how to implement each one. How does the new council deal with those? See if it agrees? Amend? Toss out?
A: Per our administrative policies, the council must set their goals for the year in January of every year, so it is on our agenda for Jan. 2. I plan to ask the new council to review the goals that were set a few months ago and decide which of them they agree with, and which, if any, they feel they might want to drop. If they want to add any additional goals, we can do that as well. Having a fresh set of goals as a starting point should make that task a little easier than it otherwise might have been.
Q: You’ve served on the both the Finance and Budget committees. How are the city’s finances doing and what are the challenges with paying for all the things that a city must typically do day-in-and-day-out coupled with issues or desires that arise from the community.
A: For a city as small as we are, we are in pretty good shape financially. We are blessed with having a significant portion of our budget funded by visitors through the transient occupancy tax and the food and beverage tax. However, our community has an appetite and a desire for services that are typically found mainly in larger cities with much higher levels of funding available for both operations and capital projects.
The highest priority for any city has to be our infrastructure – our water, wastewater treatment and our streets. We’ve had some recent water line breaks – we need to fix those quickly, and our crews have been able to do that, and we need to make sure the funds are available to take care of it. We also have about a dozen homes in Yachats that are still on a septic system and not currently served by community sewer – we have a long-term strategy to connect all of them, but that is a huge capital commitment. In the short term, we also need to replace the rotting walls in the Little Log Church, and move the city offices to the 501 Building as approved by the previous council. So our capital funding projects will be much more focused on maintaining and taking care of our future infrastructure and community needs.
Q: You mention the 501 Building. Explain the current thinking on potentially moving city employees there.
A: It’s common knowledge that the current space and layout for city office staff is woefully inadequate. So what are our practical options? If the office remains in the Commons building, it needs to be expanded, and the only realistic way to do that would be to take out a wall and expand the offices into Room 3. The financial cost wouldn’t be too bad, but the real cost would be the loss of Room 3 for community use, as well as the loss of the west entrance/exit. Neither of those would be a popular choice with the community.
The 501 Building was originally purchased with the thought of moving the city offices and the library into that space. The library commission rejected that idea because they felt they wouldn’t be gaining anything by the move, and it would eliminate future expansion possibilities. For the last year or so, the Library Commission and the 2+2 committee have been working toward a goal of moving only the library into the 501 Building but recent cost estimates indicated that no matter what they did, the cost would be prohibitive, and they decided to remain in the current library building.
It’s possible to do a fairly simple reconfiguration of portions of the 501 Building to accommodate both city offices as well as council chambers, and do it reasonably quickly (by government standards anyway). The rest of the space could remain as is until an appropriate use is found for them, and changes can be made in stages. It would finally put this unused asset to productive use, and decisions would then need to be made about how to best utilize the current council chambers and city office space. Given all the practical options open to us, moving the city offices to the 501 Building would seem to be the most logical choice.
Q: There seemed to be a lot of angst or a real or perceived lack of clarity last year about the role of city commissions or committees and the City Council? Did you see that? If so, is there a fix? Or, what’s your view of them?
A: The commissions have served a vital role in our city for years and continue to do so. They allow our citizens to take an active role in recommending many of the policies that govern our city. Earlier in 2018, the city manager began having monthly meetings with all four commission chairs to discuss what was done at their previous meeting and what was planned for the coming month. These meetings allowed free flowing communication between all of our commission chairs, and the city manager has been including the most important information to come from these meetings into her report to the council each month. But one or two councilors wanted more information, hence the angst you referred to. The new council will be discussing communication and commission structure and responsibilities in the near future, and we’ll have to wait to see what, if any, changes they might want to make. Our commissions are a perfect opportunity for citizens to help shape our future and residents can help them by volunteering.