Waldport council begins to focus on 2026 plans as city manager criticizes mayor and supporters for disruptions

By GARRET JAROS/Lincoln Chronicle

WALDPORT – While the fallout and finger pointing that has disrupted Waldport’s city government for more than a year remains unsettled, the city council looked to renew the focus of taking care of business during its monthly meeting Thursday.

The council reviewed budget schedules, listened to updates from the city manager about city projects, updated language in an ordinance about shutting off water to delinquent customers and scheduled goal-setting workshops.

But that isn’t to say all was straight business as city manager Dann Cutter addressed a recent hot-button issue that he said drained staff time which could have gone toward completing the city’s delinquent fiscal audits.

A council consent agenda item Thursday froze Cutter’s pay — at his request — until the audits are completed.

The issue Cutter referred to happened in October, when Mayor Heide Lambert contacted the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office to report the city was illegally dumping debris from the Crestline Drive sidewalk project on city property near a stream that empties into Lint Slough.

The dirt, gravel, grass and some chunks of asphalt, Cutter said, will later be used as a roadbed but resulted in a grab bag of accusations and official complaints to law enforcement and state agencies as well as trespassing – all of which resulted in no charges being filed.

There were several complaints about the debris to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, Cutter told the council Thursday. That resulted in the city meeting with agency officials who visited the site and determined there was “no intrusion into the water” or any other violations.

“At the end of the day, this was a tremendous amount of time and a tremendous amount of resources that it took the city to go and provide all of this documentation and respond to these legal claims,” Cutter said.

Staff also spoke with the Oregon Department of State Lands and the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development, which concurred that nothing inappropriate had taken place, Cutter said.

Neither Lambert, who said in a social media post that she was recovering from a scheduled medical procedure, nor councilor Rick Booth attended Thursday’s meeting. An attempt to recall six councilors was nullified late last year because of signature gathering issues, but there’s a new effort to gather signatures to hold a recall election of Lambert.

Cutter followed up at the end of the meeting to say the complaints by the mayor and her same few supporters causes significant distractions.

“The problem here is that some of these complaints involve specifically the mayor lying to police and providing false statements to both the citizenry and to the council,” Cutter said. “And to the sheriff’s office and the sheriff’s deputies.”

Cutter added the amount of time spent on those complaints – which have a specific timeline in which they must be addressed – has in the last two months impacted staff’s ability to do simple things like provide requested financial reports to the firm handling the city’s audits.

“The reality is these complaints are really becoming a hazard to our ability to continue working on everything … it’s becoming a real manpower challenge,” Cutter said.

Cutter told the Lincoln Chronicle on Friday that he has now spent nearly a month dealing with three Oregon Government Ethics Commission complaints, two DEQ complaints and one Department of State Lands complaint. And he reiterated that they were “all generated by the same few people in support of the mayor.”

Water and deputies

In other business Thursday, the council voted to withdraw from the Lincoln County Water Systems Alliance, which it tentatively joined about a year ago. The alliance seeks a collaborative effort between cities, water districts and organizations to create a regional water system for long-term water security.

The council withdrew on the advice of Cutter, who said the concern he initially had – that the group would ask for a considerable amount of money and was run by two or three people with a specific agenda – was now playing out.

The group did not ask for any member input until they had already written its bylaws, Cutter said, and now they are asking for “a pile of money” to hire staff.

The original ask by the alliance was for the city to add a 50 cent per user, per month charge to everyone’s water bill, which resulted in an instant pushback from several communities and a subsequent lowering of that request. But Cutter said the organization still has no clear direction – a claim seconded by Waldport’s city planner – and now is talking about a budget between $75,000 and $100,000 a year while also hiring consultants to do much of the work.

“Many of the mission statements of the group are accomplished through member organizations that we already belong to,” Cutter said. “More importantly, they have excluded some key players.”

And in the makeup of the board, the alliance has added groups “which again are not beholden to anyone in terms of supplying water,” Cutter said.

“And it became very clear that the people who are actually supplying water and were worried about water rights were having a diminished voice,” he said.

Cutter noted that other adjacent water districts such as Seal Rock, Southwest Lincoln People’s Utility District and the city of Newport were also not taking part in the alliance. Some smaller communities such as Yachats did tentatively agree to join the alliance, but Cutter said they too are now getting the money request and that the “rubber meets the road when you want cash. So I think this group will dwindle down pretty quickly.”

The city has also been told that due to a countywide shortage of sheriff’s deputies, one of Waldport’s contracted deputies is being pulled from the city, leaving only one full-time deputy who splits his time between Waldport and Yachats. Waldport had two deputies three years ago, then dropped to 1½ last year when it started sharing with Yachats.

“We are still getting a very good response … but the reality is we have less police coverage than we used to,” Cutter said.

Sheriff Adam Shanks told the Lincoln Chronicle this week that the two cities would not be charged for time the deputies are not in service, but the contract prorated quarterly.

• Garret Jaros covers the communities of Yachats, Waldport, south Lincoln County and natural resources issues for Lincoln Chronicle and can be reached at [email protected]