Oak Harbor Council narrows down list of priorities

Published 1:30 am Friday, March 13, 2026

During a city council workshop Tuesday, Oak Harbor council members finalized their overarching priorities for 2027 and 2028, and unlike in the past, they narrowed them down.

The council’s top concerns ranged from streamlining the permitting process for developers to addressing homelessness to protecting the water supply.

Council members are supposed to create a list of their top priorities every two years. At a council retreat on Jan. 8, the council members used sticky notes to narrow down their priorities from the nine overarching topics provided, which were each pulled from earlier priority lists. This included core subjects like public involvement, increased police engagement, roadway projects and more.

Since then, city staff have reviewed and categorized the priorities, incorporating council members’ notes on associated themes. Communication Officer Magi Aguilar sent a survey to each council member on March 5 to identify their top priorities. She then presented the findings on Tuesday.

Mayor Ronnie Wright noted that full participation in the surveys was crucial.

“These are your priorities. So when you don’t participate in the survey process, I don’t want to hear you complaining about that you’re not reflected in this,” he said. Aguilar later noted that everyone took the survey.

The top chosen priority was public involvement, which includes addressing homelessness and maintaining relationships with key regional partners. Goals that got a vote from everyone on the council were to “streamline permitting and inspections to facilitate housing development” and “ensure adequate, reliable and protected water supply,” Aguilar said.

The resulting top priorities were satisfying because they seemed to align with everyone’s views, Aguilar concluded. She said she will make the priorities document available publicly, so the community is able to follow along with the progress.

Councilmember James Marrow was enthusiastic about the selected priorities and Aguilar’s efforts in spearheading the assignment.

“Magi Aguilar, I love this because you compelled us to think about these things,” Marrow said.

Another optimistic response came from Councilmember Bryan Stucky, who agreed this is the “best and most seamless” priorities discussion he has sat through, thanks to the work of Aguilar. He remembered the New-Times article from four years ago, “City council can’t prioritize its priorities,” with a smile. The survey helped speed up the process, he said, and made it altogether more efficient.

Aguilar explained that the process went smoothly this year due to a more structured facilitation of the priorities by first letting council members discuss them at the retreat and then in the survey,

“This happened through conversations with the executive team and how we can work smarter, not harder. I also believe in meaningful conversations, and to be honest, I am a data girl. Data does not lie,” she said.

After discussion about staff and community engagement, Councilmember Sandi Peterson noted that she was under the impression that the council wasn’t supposed to interact with staff. In contrast, Wright encouraged it and emphasized the importance of showing up to staff events and parties as long as they keep conversations away from political gossiping.

Councilmember Chris Wiegenstein noted that he is neurodivergent, so it is hard for him to keep track of so many staff events, and he requested a shared calendar pre-loaded with the quarterly meetings. Marrow dittoed that request. A calendar like this is feasible, Wright said, with city-run events. Aguilar added that they will have a city-wide calendar available soon, but she is still finalizing it.

Aguilar offered to meet-one-on-one with the council members if they would like to revise or add to any priorities in the future.

“It was apparent that making a difference takes time, so I was happy to see that council wanted to continue with the priorities that are not only important to them, but also to the community,” she told the News-Times.

She will bring back an action item in April to narrow down Goal B under the “Parks and Recreation” priority, to state simply “install lighted turf fields” instead of “install lighted turf fields including Fort Nugent field lighting,” per Wright’s suggestion and Wiegenstein’s approval. The mayor’s reasoning to remove Fort Nugent from that goal is that there are other options for this goal throughout the city, Aguilar explained.