Street vacation vote took the low road

To The Eagle:

Cathlamet’s latest land giveaway was a predictable mistake. It followed a pattern of one-way gifting that in recent years has included a parking lot for Port District 1’s cabins, a big sewer rate discount for the marina, free plans for streetlight placement (paid for by the Town’s 2010 grant to re-illuminate Main Street) and now free land gained by vacating Beal Street to be used for unspecified “economic development” on the waterfront – most likely a parking lot for the brewery. The main architect of these transfers: David Goodroe, the port district’s unofficial man on the town council. Goodroe is nothing if not consistent.

The bigger disappointment is Mayor Dale Jacobson. He owns property that abuts Beal Street, and for months of public discussion on the vacation proposal, he stood back in acknowledgement of that conflict. It’s a wise rule of thumb for public officials to abstain from decision-making that could be perceived to benefit them financially, as demonstrated by Councilmember Andy Lea (a brewery partner), who neither debated nor voted on the ordinance to erase Beal Street. Initially, the mayor stood with him. As The Eagle reported when the debate started back in March:

“Mayor Jacobson and Council Member Andrew Lea, who is part of the Drop Anchor company, left the meeting room and took no part in the discussion.”

We now see the mayor’s head-fake. Despite acknowledging his conflict of interest in several public meetings, Jacobson nonetheless voted in favor of the ordinance to break a 2-2 council tie. The ethical move would have been to abstain, leaving an ordinance that clearly lacked majority council support to fail. Instead, our mayor took the low road.

Jacobson’s vote may or may not have been illegal, but ethically it stinks. RCW 3579.035 outlines rules for vacating waterfront streets; they were not followed. Worse still, the mayor cast the deciding “yes” vote despite admonitions from the town’s planning commission that abandoning Beal Street could stymie future waterfront development opportunities, and warnings from veteran firefighters about how the loss of a platted roadway raised public safety concerns. Two former mayors also opposed the giveaway.

Our system breaks down when leaders make choices that are uninformed or self-serving. In a town of Cathlamet’s size, where candidates for quasi-volunteer positions often run unopposed, too few checks-and-balances exist. That is why public resources are so consistently misallocated, lost or wasted.

George Wehrfritz

Cathlamet

Editor’s note: The size of the vacation had been reduced from the original proposal, and the vacation approved by the council, with Jacobson’s tie breaking vote, didn’t include land that abutted his property.