Council member questions light agendas

Published 1:30 am Friday, March 6, 2026

The recent lighter agendas at meetings was a prickly topic of conversation at Oak Harbor City Council this week.

In a council meeting Tuesday, Councilmember Bryan Stucky expressed his concern that the council members’ availability hasn’t been fully taken advantage of in the past month. The council members don’t normally set the agendas, though they can always make motions for issues they want to address at meetings.

“When I got the packet on Thursday,” Stucky said, “I was a little disappointed to not see any items on it for us to discuss.”

While Stucky noted that he understands that this does happen from time to time, looking at the past few meetings – from a nepotism discussion to a conversation about pickleball courts — each meeting only had one or two things to discuss, he said. He could be overreacting, he said, but it didn’t feel like they were making much progress as council members with their “lackluster” agendas recently.

“I mean, we added another meeting, which is great, and that could logically spread things across other meetings,” he reasoned. “But if you’re looking at the meetings, it doesn’t look like we’ve done much this year.”

Oak Harbor Mayor Ronnie Wright passed Stucky’s concern to City Administrator Sabrina Combs.

“Sabrina, I’ll let you respond tactfully, because I’m not sure I can,” he said.

Combs explained that agenda items are carried over from the year before if they were still being worked on. Other items include regular contracts that come up as the year progresses, an example being the recent falconer contract, she said. The staff members recently added more proclamations to the agendas to involve the community more, per the suggestion of Mayor Pro Tempore Tara Hizon. Otherwise, there may be vouchers, appointments or re-appointments that need to be approved on a regular basis, she noted.

The extra workshop is meant to give council members more opportunities to discuss issues, which will expedite the discussion at the meetings, she explained. Occasionally, Combs added, in circumstances that require a quicker solution, action items may be addressed at workshops.

“It is a balance where we try to identify the number of items that we have, and look at, you know, ‘This is gonna take about 10 minutes, this is gonna take about 20 minutes,’” she explained. “As with any entity, there are times when we have a lot of things; there are times when we have fewer things.”

City staff has been trying to work towards becoming making more efficient agendas, she added. Looking forward, Combs said that the council members will be addressing budgeting items soon and that will create a heavier schedule for the council members.

Stucky said that despite how this could have been handled over email, with the amount of community members who had asked him about it, he wanted to make it a public discussion.

“I appreciate that and look forward to having fuller agendas in the future as needed,” Stucky said.

After this discussion had concluded, Hizon spoke about her appreciation for how smoothly discourse went at a town hall meeting on Feb. 21 with Sen. Ron Muzzall, R-Oak Harbor and Rep. Dave Paul, D-Oak Harbor.

“Gosh, I wish all discourse could go like this does,” she said. “I just wanted to thank Ron Muzzall and Dave Paul for demonstrating that can be done.”

Wright agreed that positive communication is invited.

“It is refreshing to see that too, when people aren’t doing things underhandedly and behind your back, or try to put you on as a spectacle on public display,” he said. “So it’s refreshing to see people working together and partnering.”