City of Newcastle, WA -- Council Meeting of April 16th, 2013 (part 2 of 3)
The Austerity Faction of the Council Gets a Loss and a Stalemate.
The Council debated over whether to approve the Public Works Director Mark Rigos' request to purchase a trailer-mounted hydro excavator for, broadly speaking, the purpose of surface water management, but more specifically to clean up chemical spills, paint spills or other hazardous waste substances that may cause problems in storm drainage basins, Lake Boren and other bodies of water, generally. City Manager Rob Wyman said that the money for this equipment is readily available through a grant awarded to the City, and implied that if the City started going down the road of passing up grant money, particularly this one, that it could possibly have a negative effect on receiving future grants. The Council's Budget Hawk-In-Chief, Bill Erxleben, referred to the excavator as a "toy" for the Public Works Department at one point, and said that there were other ways to get at spill problems. City Manager Wyman and Director Rigos tried to explain to Erxleben and other budgetary skeptics that this was a "no-brainer" in terms of city operations, cost/benefit analysis, and the general budget (the term, "no-brainer" was actually used at one point, though, N.P.R. doesn't recall whether it was by Wyman or Rigos, but both were on the same plane, so to speak). Rigos said that there was a time factor involved, because if Public Works had to call an outside agency, it could take up to two hours to have workers at the scene to clean up a spill, but with the excavator, Public Works could take care of it themselves within minutes. Councilman Gordon Bissett said, in so many words, that he didn't care whether it was "free" money or not, because it was the public's money in any case. Similar to Tea Party fanatics in Congress, Erxleben and Bissett put budget priorities above all else, including, apparently, potential environmental emergencies, whether or not there is a real or imagined fiscal problem, although, Wyman and Rigos had explained to them that this would be a budgetary savings for Newcastle over the long haul. Erxleben said that the whole exercise, which would be of a limited use anyhow, would be very costly and not entirely from grant money, pointing out that City money would have to be expended as well, to the tune of $25,000 (presumably, annually, but N.P.R. is not certain over what length of time Erxleben meant). Councilwoman Carol Simpson sided with Erxleben and Bissett on the vote, but Deputy Mayor Jensen, Mayor Crispo, John Dulcich and Steve Buri voted in favor of purchasing the environmental equipment, thus a close 4 - 3 outcome in which the budget hawks lost.
On another front, however, the Budget Hawk-In-Chief (Erxleben) managed to get a stalemate. City Manager Wyman wanted the Council to give him the authority to approve a Solid Waste Interlocal Agreement, in other words, a long-term agreement with other cities in the region for having a combined regional system for city-wide garbage pick-ups and transfers to landfills and recycling centers. Erxleben complained that he hadn't been given enough time to read the agreement, and he noted that the City of Bellevue was pulling out of the arrangement. He seemed to suggest that Bellevue knows something that Newcastle doesn't, and that he intended to find out what that was. Simpson, Dulcich, Buri and Bissett also didn't seem to be in any rush to give this authority to Wyman, although, Bissett did seem to think that delaying was kind of silly, as he said (paraphrasing), "What are we going to do, haul our own garbage?" Wyman, especially, was not pleased by the delay, as he noted an April 30th deadline and that Newcastle was one of the last holdout cities to sign this agreement. Wyman implied that Bellevue's pull-out was of no major significance, and that Bellevue's financial impact on the overall agreement was relatively minuscule. The hardliners on this particular issue, Erxleben and Simpson, were not appeased, however. The analytical-minded Simpson, who always wants plenty of details on a variety of issues, noted that this was a 40-year deal. Wyman, however, reminded councilmembers that this issue couldn't be dragged out interminably as deadlines pass, and there was no guarantee that Newcastle would be let back into the consortium if it failed to sign the agreement in a timely manner, but deadlines seemed to be of little concern to the austerity wing of the Council. The general Council pretty much agreed to do nothing until the May 7th Meeting, at the earliest (there was some talk about a Special Council Meeting before the April 30th deadline, but that didn't seem to go anywhere).
Update: due to the length of writing about just two agenda items from the April 16th Meeting, N.P.R. has decided to make this report a three-parter instead of two, with Part 3 likely to be published tomorrow night (April 18th), probably after 8 P.M. Also, N.P.R. did not attend the April 17th Planning Commission Meeting due to the busy schedule of the editor, but will make a special effort to make the next one.
[revised 4/18/2013]
