Port Townsend outreach to focus on financial sustainability

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The city of Port Townsend is looking to expand public outreach efforts to learn which city services citizens find most crucial and how City Hall can increase revenues, as costs for services continue to increase faster than available funding streams.

In an effort to get ahead of any potential surprises, City Manager John Mauro said during the April 12 workshop the city should light the fuse on public outreach efforts to inform residents and get their thoughts on what future services might look like.

“Doing nothing essentially is very problematic for us,” Mauro said during the meeting.

“Our revenue will not keep up with inflation and the needs and the deferred maintenance and so on. These are conversations that we want to bring up now, when we have time to think about it, to plan together and to engage with our community,” he said.

Nora Mitchell, the city’s finance director, suggested creating a task force to focus on financial sustainability and community engagement before the third quarter of 2021, to include educational materials on the budgeting process, referred to as “Budget 101.”

Mitchell said a final recommendation and report could be provided to the city council by the task force by the third quarter of 2022.

Mauro said it was his intent to size-up the city’s engagement approach to determine whether it needs to be more robust in order to guarantee adequate public input.

“This is where it’s great to workshop this because we can say, let’s dial it up or dial it down,” Mauro said. “We want to have some level of engagement early on that helps us understand what people’s appetite for level of service or palatability of different revenue streams is.”

Mayor Michelle Sandoval said she had noticed a trend of recent transplants moving to Port Townsend.

“People who are falling in love and moving to Port Townsend often don’t realize the culture or the size of the town they’re really moving into,” Sandoval said.

“They look at it as a community that has so much going on that relative to where they came from, they come here and they have an expectation of the same level of service of an urban area that they left. I think that’s really where the Budget 101 and communication about who we are as a city and what our priorities are is really necessary,” she said.