By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews
YACHATS – The city of Yachats is scrambling to fill three of seven seats on its Planning Commission as resignations over health issues and frustration with city operations leave it with just one longtime member and the possibility of not having enough members to function next month.
Commission chair John Theilacker and vice chair Jacqueline Danos notified the city in November they are resigning effective Dec. 31.
Longtime commission member and former chair Lance Bloch resigned in November because of health issues. Although she is still a commission member, Tod Davies has been absent or attending meetings remotely as she also battles health problems.
The commission – which cities and counties are required to have by state law – already had one vacancy it could not fill for most of the year even before Bloch resigned. The council filled that opening this month by appointing Craig Hogan, who attended his first meeting Tuesday.
That left three seats to fill – which the commission tried unsuccessfully to do Tuesday.
Three residents had applied by last week for the openings, two more submitted applications Monday and a sixth filed an application shortly before Tuesday’s 2 p.m. meeting. They are:
- Peter Kimmel, who moved to Yachats three years ago and was a member of the Sudbury, Vt. planning commission for 10 years;
- Mary Aebi, a retired nursing instructor who has lived in Yachats for 13 years and been involved in various volunteer activities;
- Jim Paul, a retired attorney from Hawaii who has lived in Yachats for eight years;
- Jolene Gosselin, a retired civil engineer for public agencies who moved from Washington state to Yachats in 2021;
- Bill Lewey, also a retired engineer, who said on his application he was willing to serve on the planning or parks and commons commissions or the emergency preparedness committee; and
- Russell Stiles, a retired wastewater and utilities engineer who has lived in Yachats for 22 years and who filed his application right before Tuesday’s meeting.
Because of scheduling conflicts, commissioners were able to interview only Aebi, Paul, Gosselin and Stiles and will try to schedule a meeting next week to talk with Kimmel and Lewey before making a recommendation to the city council. But if staff cannot coordinate schedules to conduct the last two interviews after Christmas it will be left to the four remaining commissioners – Loren Dickinson, Marc Sakamoto, Davies and Hogan – to make a recommendation to the council in January.
Serious about planning?
It is rare in a town full of active retirees for any single volunteer to serve for years and years before losing interest or energy, moving on to other endeavors, or facing personal or family issues.
But the departure of three key Planning Commission members within a month is troublesome because unlike Yachats’ other commissions it deals with complicated legal issues, hundreds of city codes, holds quasi-judicial land-use hearings, and is authorized by the state to guide development within the city. It often takes years for commission members to get up to speed on the various – and sometimes contentious – planning and legal issues.
Its longest serving member is now Dickinson, a retired architect and active community volunteer who joined the commission in 2019.
In the past few years the Yachats commission has tackled issues such as residential, commercial and ocean lighting, fence and hedge heights, traffic and parking, wetlands studies, a proposed mini-motel, and conditional use permits for condominiums, bed and breakfast operations and workforce housing. On Tuesday, it finished two years of commission and staff work on 14 pages of detailed amendments to just one section of the city’s municipal code.
The Theilacker and Danos resignations came out of frustration with what they feel is the lack of support for more aggressive staff work and lack of oversight from a series of city managers, interim managers and the city council. Both have expressed their views to new city manager Bobbi Price.
While the city has said that housing is the most critical issue facing Yachats, for example, nothing has been done by staff to begin implementing suggestions from consultants who spent much of the past year outlining the city’s housing issues and laying out a road map how it could begin dealing with them.
“There is a whole other side of planning that we’re just not doing,” said Theilacker, who was a land-use planner for decades in Oregon and Pennsylvania.
In her resignation letter, Danos said she felt the city does not recognize the need for long-term planning.
“Unfortunately, in my view, the city of Yachats doesn’t seem to embrace the importance of long-term land use planning as I do and that has led me to decide to resign,” she wrote. “I truly appreciate this group of commissioners, especially the work and dedication of John Theilacker, whose experience and knowledge of planning has made the difference these last three years.”