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This week’s North Coast News
*Who will be the next mayor? (The $100,000 question)
*“Tourist Traps” (Jetty, Damon Point can be hazardous to your trip . . .)
*PERC rules against Ocean Shores
*Exempt Employees’ concessions
*Bank robbery possible links
*Public Works updates: $15 million water; $3 million Roundabout projects
*Guest Editorial: A salute to Dean Bunkers
*Locals Only: txt + drv = 
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on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 1:51 pm and is filed under North Coast News.
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There is another solution. We can ask Oyhut to form their own city government, just abolish ours, and have Oyhut annex us. Maybe we could also open up the annexation request to Hoquiam and Pacific Beach. Then we could officially be a suburban community and qualify for suburban federal aid for financially depressed neighborhoods, and then fall under the labor contracts for whatever city we are annexed by. City hall would make a great bus stop for Hoquiam city transit.
Comments recently posted on different listed items associated with this blog have puzzled me?
Somehow individuals have expressed contempt with the city administrations attempts to gain short term concessions from the city unions to help balance the budget? (Some unpaid days off, or extensions on increase options, rather then increase layoffs.) What is the alternative? In most cases, business and government entities do not offer the unions an alternative to share the pain equally amongst theirselves. My experience has been the “reception of a pink slip” with as little as 14 days to find another job or get into the bread lines. I’ve been thru this option. No-one gave me and my fellow employees an opportunity to share the pain with a short term benifit reduction. I was married, my wife was unemployed and my child was less then 1 year old.
As most of the readers are aware, “we” the city have topped out on “our” taxing authority. Additionaly, a recent levy to help fund EMS was turned down with almost a 70 percent margin! Where is the money for the contractual increases going to come from? For years we stole the money from the utility funds. Well, guess what? We got caught and were forced to stop! We can’t even afford to start paying it back, let alone increase city salaries! For years the economy allowed us to build 200 homes per year in town with all of the financial benifitial fallout. Well, now we are in a recession with unemployement expected to remain high and building low through the end of the current labor contracts.
Many citizens and gripers have blamed the extravagant salary increases in the last set of union contracts for the General Fund problem, but it is what it is! Wether the salaries in our town are out of line with other cities our size is a mute question, as determined by the PERC. What we need now is cooperation and / or positive ideas for revenues. If the unions do not make concessions in Ocean Shores like the others have done through out the country, there will be more pink slips. Services will be cut back, including more bad news for public safety, the library and the interpretive center.
Continue to blame the administration but don’t claim to the brothers and sisters on welfare and in the unemployment lines that you weren’t given a choice.
So, for all of you that are blaming the administration, take a look in the mirror and see what ideas look back at you! At least you were given a choice that many of us “older” folks were never given!
What was at issue was the interpetation of the contract terms itself. It was poorly written by our attorney and/or poorly negotiated by a former city manager. Did the union win? Not really. The city can not open the contract so they will do what they have to do to save the city, layoff people.
The other solution is the city going bankrupt. I wonder how the contract will fare in front of a federal judge? Maybe that is the solution the city should seek. That would repair the damage done over the last two years by an economy that has crashed and dreams that the money would keep flowing into the city accounts because of building and selling property at inflated prices by speculators both local and from outside the community.
So how much money, money that was he said the city did not have, did the mayor spend on attorneys in an attemt to prove that the unions were not operating within the requirements as dictated within the revised code of Washington? In other words, what funds were needlessy wasted in an empty attempt by our city government to try to paint the unions in a negative light, when in fact they were doing nothing wrong? I see this as the first of what will be many instances where the former-mayors complaining about the unions will prove that it was not the unions but the former-mayor himself that was out of line and misleading the citizens of this city. Of course the city council was supportive of his measures, which is why the future of this city is bleak until those who are in a position of responsibility are out of the picture and new people with a clear vision can work to repair the damage that has been done over the past couple of years…