A speaker at last week’s Board of Commissioners meeting talked about how experienced employees are an invaluable resource. The speaker, Don Beebe, expressed what a travesty it was not to tap that wealth of experience during the recent reorganization at the Road Department.
From the outside looking in, unfortunately the only perspective available to the public given the opacity of the Board’s decision, the disregard for experienced input reflects an arrogant disdain for the citizens as well as the employees and has the sharp acrid scent of hubris. How dare the Board behave as if the citizens have nothing of value to contribute on such an important topic as public safety?
Evidently the Coquille City Council has no more regard for the collective experience of the voters than the Board. Certainly we can hope that their choice of Matt Muenchrath to the Council will benefit all the citizens despite their own mediocre performance.
Still it was their choice, just six people not the electorate. These same six people have presided while a wildly unpopular and apparently incompetent police chief was allowed to run roughshod throughout the City and his department without any management or oversight from the city manager for years.
These same six people continue to allow the city manager to behave as if he were not responsible for the many police department failings. They have provided no guidance to the city manager while an unsolved murder, a critically injured member of the public, thousands of dollars stolen and the misuse of City computers happened right under his nose.
Once again I detect the scent of hubris. Arbitrary council rules enacted years ago were used to wrest control from and justify ignoring the experience of the public.
Assuming the Board of Commissioners ignores public testimony and outcry and goes through with the Road Department layoffs the already high unemployment rate in Coquille will jump even higher. The layoff will effect schools, businesses and further reduce our tax base. Will the ever vigilant and alert Coquille City Council develop a plan to deal with these inevitable changes or come up with knee jerk reactions just like the Board?
Resource depletion is not why budgets get tight or societies fail. They fail because leaders do not adapt to resource depletion. The Board has not responded or adapted to changing economic conditions, instead they have reacted, frantically, wildly in a state of panic. Reaction is not leadership it is the absence of leadership.
Instead of blaming the legislature or pleading with a large corporation to ride in like a white knight and rescue the county like a damsel in distress there are many solutions available to enable local sustainability that are much more dignified. These solutions will require adaptation and a willingness to think out of the box but they do exist.
Energy is one way to become self-sustaining and fund public services such as road maintenance, public health and education. Five megawatts of distributed generating power operating at full capacity can earn $3M annual revenue. Using a ratio of 1.4 and assuming a AAA credit rating, $3M qualifies for $2.1M in debt service and translates into $19.2M financing at 9.5% interest although a bank will limit a loan to 80% of cost.
Centralized wind farms cost about $1.5M per megawatt excluding the cost of transmission. At that cost $19M in financing would pay for more than 12MW of power generation and might provide some insight into why energy is popular on Wall Street. The net earnings $.9M after paying debt service assumes a 20-year loan but distributed generation is less expensive than centralized power allowing a much faster payoff.
Generating 5 or 10MW of power locally instead of importing power and exporting dollars to investor owned utilities is just one of many ways to adapt the resources we have to suit our changing needs. These are by no means simple deals to structure but they are done successfully in the US and Europe, all it takes is competent and adaptive leadership.
If we invite the collective experience of our citizens and the people we work with everyday rather than keeping everyone in the dark many unique solutions will have the opportunity to present themselves. Hubris is not adaptive and the very act of excluding the very people affected by a decision from the decision process is polarizing and invites mistrust. For this reason, I believe Stufflebean has impaired his own ability to lead and should resign as interim roadmaster and give up his liaison assignment to the Road Department.
