Mayor's honeymoon with council ends

After two years of relative bliss, the Oak Harbor City Council’s most outspoken member has called off the honeymoon with Mayor Patty Cohen.

Councilman Paul Brewer was perhaps former Mayor Steve Dernbach’s biggest critic, fighting him on issues related to growth, development and planning. Cohen, on the other hand, has enjoyed a comparatively peaceful relationship with Brewer and the other members of the council since taking office.

Yet Cohen’s plan to disband the comprehensive plan task force has Brewer taking off the kid gloves.

“To me it’s dirty politics, plain and simple, and I won’t be silenced anymore,” he said Thursday. “I’ve really worked hard to support the mayor over the last two years, but this is a slap in the face.”

The controversy itself, however, is a bit convoluted.

What happen is this: The consultant Cohen hired to help the city streamline the permitting process proposed that the city eliminate the comprehensive plan task force and let the planning commission handle the work of updating the city’s comprehensive plan each year.

But this proposal was rejected by a 3-2 vote at a city council meeting in November. Normally, that would be the end of the issue, since under the usual rules of order a proposal can only be brought back to the council by members who originally voted against it.

The wrinkle is that council members John LaFond and Nora O’Connell-Balda were absent from that meeting. Under a rule City Attorney Phil Bleyhl said the council adopted at a workshop, members who were absent from a meeting can also bring an issue back onto the agenda.

Brewer disputes that the council ever agreed on the rule. “Seems to me we change the rules to what is convenient for the administration,” he said.

So at Cohen’s request, LaFond made a motion to reconsider the proposal at the Dec. 18 meeting and O’Connell-Balda seconded it. At that meeting it will likely pass by a 4-3 vote, with LaFond, O’Connell-Balda, Sheilah Crider and Richard Davis voting in favor.

The meeting will be LaFond’s last one as a city councilman since he didn’t seek re-election. He’ll be replaced by Eric Gerber, who may not vote the way Cohen would like.

Brewer wasn’t the only one who objected to the political maneuver. Councilman Bob Morrison, a long-time member of the task force, said allowing the resolution to be brought before the council again would “open a Pandora’s box.”

Under the Growth Management Act, every town, city and county in the state must create a comprehensive plan to deal with future growth. The city completed its comp plan years ago, but it has to be updated and amended each year so that it continues to look 20 years into the future.

Since the process is supposed to have as much public input as possible, the city created a task force to wade through the materials and make recommendations. Their recommendations go on to the planning commission, which in turn makes recommendations and sends the document on to the city council for final approval.

The sticking point for Brewer is that each council members gets to appoint a community member to the task force, but the city planning commission is made up solely of mayoral appointees.

Thus, Cohen conceivably would have more sway over the shape of comp plan amendments if the task force disappears.

“It’s a little dictatorship,” Brewer said. “The mayor gets to pick everyone. ... It’ll make it easier for her to get her legislation through.”

In addition, Brewer said he’s upset about the way the proposal was brought about. He said the task force members weren’t notified of the proposed change, while the planning commission was.

But LaFond said the issue isn’t about power, but economics. He said the bulk of the main work is done on the comp plan and there’s “more or less just minor revisions left.”

“We’ve reached a point now,” he said, “where we need to do something to streamline the process and decrease the workload.”

LaFond said it will mean less meetings for city planning staff to attend, and less overtime, if the planning commission handles the comp plan amendments without “the double step” of the task force’s meetings. In fact, he said planning commission members have felt left out of the process in the past since they were just “rubber stamping” the work done by the task force.

“It’s not that I’m against the task force,” he said. “It’s just a logical development at this time. In five or six years we may need to re-convene the task force.”

You can reach Jessie Stensland at jstensland@whidbeynewstimes.com or call 675-6611.

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