By Randy Kugler
The City of Manzanita’s “new ask us your questions initiative” should perhaps be better described as “ask us your questions that we want to answer.”
Given that the City Budget for next fiscal year is now under development and the Budget Committee held a workshop on April 9 to begin this process, I submitted some observations and questions based on what the City Manager told us during development of the FY 22/23 Budget in the hopes some answers would be forthcoming.
The City Manager and Mayor apparently believed that questions were really not what they wanted citizens to ask and did not include mine in the Budget Committee packet for citizens to see nor were citizens invited to ask questions at the meeting.
As you may recall, the City hired a consultant four years ago for about $30,000 to deliver a model to justify taking overhead allocation transfers from the Water Operating Fund for City Hall staff. After two years, the Council decided that neither they nor citizens could understand the model and they stopped using it in favor of the new Warrenton methodology. It now appears that rather than admit that they cannot now explain how this model works in Manzanita, they will simply ignore answering any questions.
I have observed a pattern with the City over the years of making statements or representations that were expedient at the moment to convince citizens to see things as the City wants us to see them. Whether it’s the City Hall project or in this case, the ever evolving justifications to take money out of the Water Operating Fund to spend on non water utility related expenses through transfers to the General Fund, the strategy relies on the expectation that we will forget what we were told earlier and be satisfied with newly discovered explanations today.
Until the City can figure out how it wants to pursue its newfound interest in being transparent and answering our questions on important issues, I will continue to share my observations and ask my questions on available social media. In the meantime, if you are interested in seeing the questions that the Mayor and City Manager did not want you to see at the Budget Committee meeting, you can find them here:
https://tinyurl.com/czsdb798
