Donald E. Forbes, a former director of the Oregon Department of Transportation, is paving a new path as a member of the Port Ludlow Drainage District (PLDD).

On Dec. 6, Forbes took a seat vacated by longtime commissioner Dwayne Wilcox in October 2016. Katie Smith was appointed in September to a seat vacated by Jim Boyer. Allen Uyeda is the board’s third member.

“It’s a great opportunity to help my community,” said Forbes, who moved from Seattle to North Bay in Port Ludlow in the summer of 2016 and has been remodeling a home.

Forbes said he heard about the position through engineers he knew and was asked to become a candidate for the appointment.

When he was serving as head of the highway division for the State of Oregon from 1991 to 1995, Forbes managed the day-to-day operations of the system as well as leading a major business reorganization of the department. He currently works as a specialty consultant on major industrial design and construction projects throughout the U.S. and Canada, including the $3.9 billion replacement of the Tappan Zee Bridge in New York City.

And he doesn’t expect to worry about huge projects for the tiny drainage district in the coming years.

Forbes said many capital projects have already been completed, but he wants to hear from the district’s civil engineer before coming to any conclusions.

“At this point, we are looking at how to cost-effectively maintain things,” he said. He noted that it’s typical that there are more things that need to be done than a community has the ability to pay for.

Established by voters in 2000 to assess and contract stormwater and common property drainage plans for the North Bay area, the PLDD is a tax-levying, special-purpose utility district. The PLDD receives annual tax income from 1,100 North Bay lot owners within its boundary. The amount assessed depends on land use and impervious surface coverage.

PLDD commissioners work alongside the North Bay homeowners’ group, the Ludlow Maintenance Commission (LMC), to approve stormwater drainage designs and natural vegetation removal, as well as addressing potential drainage control issues, according to the 2002 agreement between the PLDD and the LMC.

PAY ISSUES

One issue PLDD commissioners face is how much each should be paid per meeting, after Smith discovered that apparently there was no documentation authorizing commissioner compensation.

From where Smith sits, as a recent district watchdog turned board member, commissioners may not be entitled to any compensation until the beginning of their next term, since it is unclear how the board established the per diem rate in 2000.

Smith said the only resolution she could find for compensation happened on Nov. 10, 2016, when the board set the per diem rate at $114, with compensation beginning at the start of each commissioner’s term. For her, that would be in 2020. For Forbes, that would be in 2018. For Uyeda, that would be in 2022.

Legally, commissioners can’t vote on their own salary – they can only establish the salary of future commissioners.

At the Dec. 8 board meeting, Forbes made a motion to establish $90 per diem as the rate for commissioners, based on what commissioners had been getting, Smith said. Smith abstained from that vote based on her research that “any compensation action must take effect at the beginning of the new term(s), not immediately.”

Before being appointed to the PLDD board, Smith had questioned whether it was legal for drainage district commissioners to have given themselves a $24-per-meeting pay raise in 2015.

Commissioners Wilcox and Uyeda agreed to pay the district back for every meeting for which they were paid more than the $90 rate set when they took office.

NEW COMMISSIONER

Forbes has an MBA from Pacific Lutheran University and an master’s in structural engineering from the University of Colorado, according to his résumé.

In Oregon, he was responsible for managing the state’s highways, bridges and airports. He also was involved with the Caltrans Toll Bridge Seismic Retrofit Program, which included construction of the $1.4 billion San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge.