PORT ANGELES — City Council candidate Max Mania jabbed while his opponent, Edna Petersen, ducked and weaved at a Port Angeles Business Association breakfast forum Tuesday.
In answering questions from the audience of about 40, Mania and Petersen — who face each other in the Nov. 3 general election — differed in tone and substance as they touched on open government, their own budget experience, the city’s stormwater improvement project, the fate of the vast Rayonier pulp mill property east of downtown and the role of the Harbor-Works Development Authority, which plans to buy and redevelop Rayonier site.
“I have the experience and ethics to make positive change in Port Angeles,” Mania, 41, said in his opening comments. “There is so much potential here.”
Mania, a grocery clerk, began his introduction by citing the Peninsula Daily News’ Sunday Peninsula Poll results, published in Tuesday’s edition, on whether “local government is on the level with you.”
Of 245 respondents, 80.8 percent said local government “only sometime,” seldom or never is on the level.
Mistrust of government “is a big issue in my campaign,” Mania said.
Then he started swinging away.
Mania says he wasn’t invited
“I was never invited to this forum,” Mania said.
He first heard about it Saturday by reading PABA Program Committee Co-chairwoman Paris Bishop’s general meeting announcement, he said.
Bishop confirmed that she told him of the event on Saturday.
Mania also suggested that Andrew May, Petersen’s campaign chairman — who also co-chairs PABA’s program committee — may have had something to do with the oversight.
“It could have been an honest mistake. It could not have been,” Mania said, adding that a negative perception was created by the foul-up.
“If there was miscommunication, I’m sorry, but don’t go putting on me [an] evil intention,” May, also the PDN’s gardening columnist, said in a later interview.
May said he had told Mania personally about the forum on three different occasions, but that in the future, PABA guest speakers would be notified by e-mail.
Petersen, 69, said she would “do something different” than Mania for her opening remarks, reading from a prepared statement as she focused on what she learned while spending four days at the Clallam County Fair in August.
Harbor-Works
“I learned that Harbor-Works was the biggest thing on everybody’s mind,” she said.
Asked about the role of Rayonier, Harbor-Works and the city of Port Angeles “in the mess that Rayonier has left us,” Petersen said details still must be worked out on final cleanup of the site, which contains pockets of PCBs, dioxins and other pollutants.
Rayonier is cleaning up the site according to industrial standards, a lower level than that required for a playground, for instance, she said.
“Who takes care of the bill, I’m not sure,” she said. “State government dollars will help with that.”
Mania said the city should not be “on the hook” for cleanup costs and that when Harbor-Works, a public development authority, was established, too much of the process took place behind closed doors in executive sessions.
He said he’s worried Harbor-Works might become responsible for cleanup and accused Rayonier of “stalling.”
“I want them to clean up the site,” Mania said. “Even though there have been public forums, I think there is still a sense of that the community needs more input into this.”
Mania also said he attended a class on Rayonier to which all candidates were invited that was sponsored by Darlene Schanfald, longtime project coordinator of the Olympic Environmental Council Coalition’s Rayonier Hazardous Waste Cleanup Project.
“I attended. My opponent did not,” he said, adding the same was true when Rayonier CEO Lee Thomas was a PABA speaker.
“Those things happen,” Petersen responded.
“I continue to take pot shots about what I have and haven’t been to from candidate Mania,” she said, adding she was in San Diego on a pre-planned trip for one of the meetings.
“I care about this community,” she added.
Initiative 1033
Mania and Petersen also were asked about the impact Initiative 1033 would have on the funding for the federally-mandated treatment of stormwater.
That project, too, is related to the Rayonier site: The city intends to use a 5-million-gallon tank on the property to store untreated sewage and stormwater.
Initiative 1033, a statewide measure on the Nov. 3 ballot, would limit the revenue growth of cities, counties and state government to the previous year’s revenue, excluding voter-approved revenue increases.
Final revenues would be adjusted, based on inflation and population.
Revenue collected above the limit would reduce property tax levies.
Rayonier has said the tank will be transferred at the same time Harbor-Works buys the rest of the former mill site.
Petersen and Mania said they are opposed to 1033, with Mania saying several candidates intend to buy advertising against the measure to present a unified front of opposition in an effort he said he is spearheading.
Petersen has faith in the city staff “that they will lead and guide us and help us through the challenge of stormwater,” she said. “We have to do what we are asked to do by the federal government.”
But tank storage is “outmoded technology,” Mania said, adding that there are ways to treat stormwater and sewage that would generate heat and steam and create jobs.
Budget experience
Asked about their budget experience, Mania said that, like most people, he has no experience with city budgets but has coordinated budgets for large events, that he is frugal and and that he has an “eye for detail,” gained from being a former proofreader.
Petersen said he has budget experience as a store owner and for working two years on the city budget as a City Council member from 2006 to 2008.
“I, too, have done a lot of events,” she said.
In addition, she said monitoring the city budget is a 12-month-a-year job, not something that takes place in the fall.
“It’s not just this short process we are working through now,” she said.
Challenged to be more specific about his criticism of closed-door meetings, Mania said new City Manager Kent Myers had improved outreach to citizens as indicated by comments he’s heard from “dozens” of people.
But the city could do more, he said, including keeping an e-mail list of residents who want to be involved and notifying them of important dates and events.
Petersen said that, during her time on the City Council, executive sessions “were very closely tied to the law,” she said.
“We never talked about things that were not on the agenda for the executive sessions,” she said.
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Staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.