Town counsel responds to conflict charge

To The Eagle:

I write in response to George Hanigan's letter published August 12, 2010, under the caption "Town's obligations already too numerous," in which Mr. Hanigan impugns both my personal integrity and my professional competence, and that of Councilwoman Ruth Doumit.

I will not allow those aspersions and the erroneous analysis that underlies them to go unchallenged and uncorrected.

Mr. Hanigan claims that he has "heard the opinion expressed by several citizens" that Councilwoman Doumit and I, "as adjacent landowners... had a personal and professional conflict of interest and should have not participated in the meeting where the decision to proceed was made." I find it odd that, apart from Mr. Hanigan's letter to The Eagle, I have not heard any such concerns expressed to me.

First, it should be noted that the subject matter of the public meeting to which Mr. Hanigan refers, and at which he was not present, dealt with the specific question put by Mayor Wehrfritz to the town council of whether or not the conceptual plan for the proposed "Queen Sally Park" as prepared by Architects Without Borders should be submitted as the basis for a sizable government grant. Since neither my property, which adjoins the Town's property to the north, nor that more remote property owned by Councilmember Ruth Doumit, was included in the conceptual plan for the Town Hall "park" proposal, and no beneficial interest, directly or indirectly, would necessarily come to either myself or Councilmember Doumit as a result of applying for and receiving the government grant for the Town Hall park, there was no conflict of interest that would have required Councilwoman Doumit to recuse herself. (See RCW 42.23.030). If the "[joint] Doumit properties for parking issue" ever ripens into anything more than a suggestion of a possibility, the public can rest assured that Councilwoman Doumit has been counseled on her duty to recuse herself from the discussion and vote, and the Council will be advised of the right to retain independent counsel and/or give informed consent to talk with me about a transaction involving us as parties.

As I am not a member of the council, I did not participate in the discussion or the vote deciding the issue. I did confirm to the mayor and council that in early 2006, two years before I became the Town Attorney and nearly four years before Ruth Doumit joined the council, I wrote a letter to the Town, indicating that I was amenable to exploring the possibility of developing some additional public parking behind my law office. No geotech study establishing whether or not it was even feasible to develop the hillside into parking, nor formal bids as to what it may cost were ever done by either the town or me. The offer merely represented our observation that the south end of Main Street could use some additional public parking and that my wife and I, and tangentially Ruth and Steve Doumit, who own behind the store building, were amenable to working with the town to accomplish that if it were feasible. Then Mayor Dick Swart's informal response to me was that the town was not financially in a position to do anything like that at that time.

Earlier this year, at the public meetings conceptualizing the Town Hall/Pioneer Church Building Center, I restated our willingness to discuss the possibility of a public/private partnership to develop public parking but no discussions have taken place.

According to Mr. Hanigan, this somehow has created a "conflict of interest" that impairs my professional ability to advise my client, the town, and he infers that Ruth Doumit and I are out to profit from this situation. This inference doesn't allow for the possibility that civic-minded businesspeople in this town who want to revive Main Street business may negotiate terms that would be more beneficial to the town than themselves. My law office property already has ample private parking to serve my building and I really don't need the aggravations and potential nuisances that can come from providing public parking on my property. Just maybe my motives for trying to facilitate increased public parking are less mercenary, and more in keeping with the late Effie Wright's motive of donating money to the town, than Mr. Hanigan suggests.

Whatever may or may not occur on the back portion of "the Doumit properties" is purely conjectural and was not a specific element in the action before the council, therefore Councilwoman Doumit acted properly be participating in the discussion and vote, and Mayor Wehrfritz acted properly in allowing it.

It saddens me to see that our public discourse nowadays too often resorts, early and often, to personal attacks and character damaging innuendo. Why don't we try argument on the merits or weaknesses of the particular proposal, and see if the public good can't be better served by that.

Thomas M. Doumit

Attorney at Law

Cathlamet