To the editor:
Continuing a 13-month trend, regular Yachats City Council meeting attendees last week witnessed three more instances of lack of respect towards new council members James Kerti and Leslie Vaaler.
In Thursday’s session, Mayor John Moore described the position of council president as mostly ceremonial and opened the nomination process. Kerti nominated Vaaler. The mayor had an opportunity to graciously accept the notion that the two newest councilors were aligning on a minor item and move towards a vote. However, the mayor ignored the gift he had been given, re-nominated Councilor Max Glenn, and called for the vote. Noting it was 2-2, the mayor turned towards Councilor Jim Tooke and put him on the spot to make the decision. Councilor Glenn could have declined the nomination and participated in team building among the City Council but chose not to. Missed opportunity No. 1.
Later in the meeting, Vaaler raised a concern that by scheduling another professionally facilitated session to identify the council’s goals for 2020 the mayor had blurred the lines between policy and administration. Vaaler further indicated she believed the council was capable of determining its top 3-5 priorities for 2020 without a facilitator. Moore appeared to acknowledge that he mistakenly believed that council had approved the facilitated session and related expenditures (they had not) but argued that the decision to hold such a session was an administrative one and belonged to the city manager. He basically dismissed Vaaler’s concern as irrelevant. Missed opportunity No. 2.
For background, Mayor Moore and I revised Yachats Administrative Procedure No. 6, prohibiting any one or two councilors from directing city staff to use city resources towards activities that had not been authorized by the entire council. Council goals are clearly the responsibility of the council and are not an administrative task to be delegated to the city manager.
The city manager, as custodian of the minutes and agendas of the council, had to have known that council had not agreed to hold a facilitated session to set its priorities. Whether the city manager pointed out the conflicts and was bullied into submission or chose to ignore Administrative Procedure No. 6 is unknown.
The third missed opportunity involved Mayor Moore asking, for the record, if Kerti and Vaaler’s position on filling council vacancies was a direct result of having been passed over by the previous council to fill the position vacated by Greg Scott when he resigned in 2018. This line of questioning appeared to be a questioning of Kerti and Vaaler’s integrity and was way out of line in a public forum.
Yachats has one more year of this mayor/council combination and needs to be focused on the top 3-5 goals for 2020. We have several items to choose from that need attention. Please don’t waste another year negotiating rules, procedures and roles. The mayor and council should get on with governing, as they were elected to do.
— Tom Lauritzen, Yachats
