After more than eight years of Mondays at council, I’m voting for change to elect Monica MickHager. Monica wants citizen voices to be respected and included again.

Attending City Council has been a regular Monday evening education since before councilmembers Gray and Stinson were elected in 2012. We watched both sworn in and watched when council selected Stinson as mayor twice. My husband and I have missed very few meetings in the last eight years. We learned about councilmanic debt, which requires only a council vote. Citizens pay for it through their property taxes but do not have any voice at all in whether it is enacted. Typically, council vote was 6 to 1, with Bob Gray voting against increasing debt without a citizen vote.

Councilmanic debt doesn’t raise our taxes explicitly so much as it spends existing funds that can no longer be used for their intended purpose. When we spend our general obligation taxes on debt, or to match grants for low-priority projects, we no longer have the money for maintenance and repair. We can no longer afford sufficient staffing levels. Other debt has revenue streams for funding. The water treatment plant construction is funded by utility taxes. We now pay for some unrelated staff positions out of our utility taxes. No citizen vote required.

We paid $600,000+ for a concrete triangle with the planned public restroom eliminated in front of the Visitors’ Center. That will cost more than $1 million to pay off since that $600,000 was funded with debt we’ll pay interest on. Yet donors had to provide $25,000 to fence a simple dog park that citizens had been requesting for a decade.

Voters had no voice in any of this, not even an advisory vote. Let’s vote for change and elect Monica MickHager.

Deborah Jahnke
Port Townsend