I watched the city council budget workshop via the internet on Monday. The cable TV feed is broken, and they actually joked about it during the meeting, but nobody asked staff to look into it. Typical.

The proposed budget itself is like a train approaching a bridge washout. Red flags are waving, but nobody sees them. The proposed budget of course has more requests than revenue, and the projections forward look even worse.

Council spent most of their time on revenue, and trying to figure out where they could enhance their revenue, mainly by taxing citizens on their water bills, more reliable than sales tax revenues which can drop in case of a recession.

What council didn’t do was look at the budget requests with any kind of care. Leadership at city council doesn’t appear to be reading carefully at all. Top item on the budget list: $10K for new office furniture for the new city manager. Second: another administrative assistant: $80K. Then: new conference room chairs: $2K. Office improvements: $5K. Hey, let’s wait for the new city manager and see if these things really matter in a world where $100K for local road repair is not even on the list.

Adequate budgeting for local road repairs has been on the “unmet needs list” for several years running, but never gets funded. We know this because one council member inquired. During a brief discussion, no one asked staff to add it to the proposed budget. Most of city council just laughed about this perennial budget stepchild.

Here’s what we get - no road repairs, nice new office furniture, additional utility taxes and our presiding council member is laughing at budget workshops that accept no public comment.

Vote for Monica MickHager. She sees the red flags waving and she’s not laughing.

Taylor Clark
Port Townsend