SEQUIM — Mayor Laura Dubois stood by her committee appointments despite objections from former Mayor Walt Schubert at a City Council study session Monday.
Most of Dubois’ 2009 appointments — each council member has between three and six committee assignments — stayed the same as last year, but she moved council member Schubert off the Clallam County Economic Development Council to the city Planning Commission liaison position.
Schubert objected.
“I am not interested in that,” he said of being council liaison to the planning panel.
When he requested to be put back on the EDC as the City Council representative, Dubois asked: “Did you bring us a ballot to vote on the EDC board?”
Dubois told Schubert that she knew he had received ballots, which were to be passed out to the council to vote.
She proceeded to pass some out.
“If you cannot attend the planning meetings, let me know why,” she said.
“I was told that you attended only about 50 percent of the meetings, and besides, you didn’t bring us our ballots.”
Schubert replied: “It isn’t that I can’t; it is that I’m not interested in planning. I won’t.
“And that isn’t true about me not going to half the meetings — your information is wrong.”
Said Dubois: “Well, I guess we won’t have a planning liaison then.”
Nothing voted on
No votes were taken at Monday’s daytime City Council meeting, which was for informational purposes only.
The council did not set a time for a potential retreat for team building, which has been contemplated.
The council did discuss changes in law that will require the city to have a checklist of the environmental impacts of new projects on the city, Frank Needham, capital projects manager, said.
The changes in the state Environmental Policy Act, or SEPA, require that the city evaluates each project based on the environmental impact.
The checklist will work with the Climate Action Plan, in which the city will determine a “baseline” of carbon emissions — probably based on the 1990 levels — and work toward reducing emissions to those levels, Needham said.
Interwoven with the checklist are building energy conservation standards with the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED building standards.
“We are doing many of these things already in our projects,” council member Ken Hays said.
“I think it would be a great idea for us to provide the information and links to the public on our Web site on these standards, because by necessity many people are already doing a lot of these things.”
Upcoming projects
Because the standards would be applied to public works projects, the council segued into talking about upcoming projects.
Hays suggested that because federal and state grants will become more available as a result of President-elect Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plans, a professional grant writer should be enlisted to help identify and write grants for the city.
“I have no idea what kind of cost it would be, but we could look into it, and it could possibly more than pay for itself,” Hays said.
Dubois said that it could be looked into to help alleviate some work for city staff members who currently write grants within their own departments.
“We should look into whether we could do it on a sort of pay-by-performance type deal,” she said.
The council will next meet for its regular meeting on Jan. 12 at 6 p.m. at the Sequim Transit Center, 190 W. Cedar St.
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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladailynews.com.
