At the July 21st Board meeting, the Board members were due to elect their officers for the new term. Yet, every Board member had reasons why they couldn’t take the helm as Board Chair. The meeting concluded without a Board Chair. The members set an action item to see if current policies could be changed to allow for co-chairs or other options for District leadership.
SYNOPSIS: The District is in a dicey situation! The Board purchased a forest which is now the financial liability of the ratepayers, but there is no Board Chair, no current plan for how the forest will be operated-financed, and the Board’s approach for getting an operations-finance plan is to have the contract Forester develop it starting in September. The current absence of leadership for the District’s water business and forest business is troubling.
The demands on the Board are a bit overwhelming and not likely to ease for the foreseeable future.
In addition to the existing business of supplying domestic water, the Board has taken on the business of starting up & running a forestry operation. Unlike Nehalem, Cannon Beach and Astoria that have full time, paid staff to plan and make financial and policy decisions about the forest business, in Arch Cape this work falls squarely on the part time, volunteer, elected District Board. With the finance committee disbanded and the project manager from Sustainable NW unexpectedly quitting and taking another job, the Board is short on the background/expertise to put a financial operations plan in place until the contract Forster gets back in September from prior commitments with his other clients. To further complicate the situation, members of the community are becoming increasingly vocal about wanting to know what is happening and to be included in the decision-making process.
No Board member wants to take on the role of Board Chair at this critical juncture.
At Thursday’s meeting, some Board members expressed concern about their age and lack of relevant background/expertise to run the forest. Another wants to scale back the time commitments. Other Board members talked about conflicting demands from their professional careers and families. All expressed a strong negative reaction to elements in the community that are raising concerns about the lack of ratepayer involvement in the decision-making process and the Board’s absence of a plan or a ‘plan for a plan’.
The Board members’ reservations about taking on the Board Chair position are all reasonable and it is true that listening to and incorporating ratepayer input does add complexity to the management process. Yet, the timing of this leadership vacuum in the District can’t be much worse given that there is a water business and a forest business to be run and the clock is ticking on; a) the operating costs associated with a just-purchased forest, b) the short-term timeframe demands for figuring out how to spend Covid relief funds and c) the logging scheduled for next summer (2023).
Ratepayers’ efforts to have a say about what happens with Watershed are not well received.
Operating/logging the forest is now a business of the District and, similar to other areas across the Northwest, a flashpoint for community concerns. Whereas ratepayers have been typically agnostic about the business of supplying domestic water, it should be expected that they will be more vocal about the business of running a forest, specifically given their financial liability for it and their value-based interests/concerns related to logging and recreation in their Watershed. Sadly, the ratepayers’ questions and their determination for inclusion in the decisions about what happens with their Watershed are being perceived by Board members as personal affronts rather than a democratic part of the business & political landscape. Community inclusion does not yet appear to be on the horizon.
The Board purchased the forest and now needs to put forth leadership that will step up to the job at hand – running the water business, proposing a plan for paying for and operating the forest, and vetting the forest’s operating plan with the community. The bad news is that there is a lot of hard work ahead of them. The good news is that there are people in the community with relevant forestry and financial management experience that are willing to help.
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