The Aberdeen City Council on Wednesday evening halted lodging tax funding for a nonprofit led by Mayor Douglas Orr to hold a pair of prominent art festivals in the city, with some councilors citing a broad city charter that strictly prohibits city officials from having an interest in city contracts.
The vote came two meetings after a divided council sent back initial recommendations from the city’s Lodging Tax Advisory Committee (LTAC) to award funding for Harbor Art Guild, for which Orr serves as president of the board of directors, with the council requesting more discussion and information about a potential conflict of interest.
Wednesday’s council, which has since Dec. 20 turned a handful of seats, denied funding for the guild nearly unanimously, with only Scott Prato opposed to the motion and Liz Ellis abstaining.
The vote was a tumultuous finish to Orr’s first month as mayor of Aberdeen that put his new role as leader of the city at odds with the work that helped get him there. It also cast uncertainty over the future of the Rain Glow Festival and Aberdeen Art Walk, annual summer art festivals downtown.
“One of the reasons I ran for mayor was because I saw a city, a city council and a city government, that was too eager to say ‘no’,” Orr said in his concluding comment’s following Wednesday’s vote. “Any event that anybody does for our downtown community, it’s worth making an effort to keep, because our poor community suffers because we don’t have events, we don’t have things for our children to do that make them want to stay here when they grow up. It’s decisions that this council makes that chase our young people away. Just keep that in your minds.”
A charter trumps state law
Conflict of interest discussions dominated the meeting Wednesday and overshadowed the council’s approval of eight other grant requests from a handful of community groups for various festivals and events.
Tourism funding requests from the Grays Harbor Historical Seaport, Our Aberdeen and Open Studios Tours were also denied.
The awards totaled about $55,000 out of the $90,000 the city budgeted for LTAC this year.
That money comes from taxes imposed on hotel, motel and short-term rental stays, and must be spent for the purpose of drawing tourists back to Aberdeen. The LTAC committee that recommends funding amounts to the council is comprised of five members, including applicants, hospitality business owners and the city’s finance committee chair, in this case Councilor Debi Pieraccini.
In addition to the other applications, the committee initially recommended awarding $10,500 between Orr’s two applications, which were evaluated separately from the rest of the bunch.
But the council in December sent Orr’s applications back to the LTAC committee with a recommended $0 after a motion from Councilor Stan Sidor, who cited conflict of interest concerns.
On Wednesday, Sidor presented the new recommendation from the LTAC committee that suggested the Art Guild not receive funding, and explained the committee came to the decision because of a discrepancy between city charter and state law.
Washington state law on municipal conflict of interest states that city officers should not be directly or indirectly beneficially interested in any contract in which the city takes part. That alone would prohibit Orr, as president of the guild, from holding the mayor’s office while the city gives a grant to the group.
But the state law is layered. It provides pages of exceptions, like remote interests — including when a city official is a non-salaried officer of a nonprofit, or if their wages are fixed and not dependent on the contract.
Section 12 of the city’s charter, however, is blunt. The two-sentence rule provides no wiggle room and prohibits city officers from having any beneficial interest in city contracts, stating that a violation of the law should result in removal from office.
In many other cases, Sidor said, state law takes precedent over city charter. But chapter 42.23 of the RCW, which covers ethics for public officers, states that for any laws included in the chapter, “the charter shall control if it contains stricter requirements than this chapter.”
In other words, city charter trumps state law.
According to Pieraccini, the LTAC committee was in unanimous agreement about recommending denying Orr’s funding request, given the authority of the city charter.
“We’re just literally reading the city charter and abiding by that,” Sidor said after Wednesday’s meeting. “It’s our interpretation it’s not legal.”
Sidor declined to acknowledge whether or not the city had consulted legal advice about the conflict of interest issue, stating, “Any legal opinion that we would have received would have been received in confidence,” and to disclose it would be an ethical violation.
Aberdeen City Administrator Ruth Clemens said on Thursday morning that an attorney had, in fact, provided a legal opinion.
“(The attorney) does not believe there is any conflict,” Clemens told the council Dec. 20.
Pieraccini acknowledged the attorney’s opinion after the meeting but said that advice was given as an interpretation of state law itself and didn’t consider the authority of the city charter.
“We could change the charter, but that costs a lot of money to change the charter, you have to take that for a vote before the people,” Pieraccini said.
Clemens said the city charter acts as sort of a “constitution” for a city, and much of it dates back to the city’s establishment. Aberdeen is one of six “first class” cities in Washington state — a city with a population of 10,000 or more at the time of its organization — and therefore adopted a charter. Most other municipalities are “code” cities, which are based on the Revised Code of Washington.
A workaround
The council took public criticism Wednesday for what commenters said was a harmful decision that could’ve been avoided with a creative solution.
Steven Puvogel, a Hoquiam City Council member and organizer of the Grays Harbor Pride Festival, which received a $3,000 LTAC grant, said he was not aware of any other festival like Rain Glow. He said he respected the council’s right to deny funding, but felt “it was a decision that this council does not want to fund those festivals,” Puvogel said. “To put it in any other light, I feel, is disingenuous. If you want to have those festivals happen, you’ll make it happen.”
Les Bolton, a former director of the Grays Harbor Historical Seaport, said the Rain Glow Festival “was one of the unique things we had in this community, and you guys voted that down, you didn’t try to find a workaround.”
Sidor said some members of the council approached Orr about stepping down from his position with the Harbor Art Guild to absolve the conflict and allow the organization to receive LTAC funding. Sidor said no representative from the guild attended the last LTAC meeting to contribute to discussions about their grants.
“Some various proposals were made about workarounds, but apparently at this point in the process they’ve not been accepted,” Sidor said after the meeting. “Every time we’ve come to him and said, ‘Here’s a way to work around it,’ he has said ‘no.’”
Orr has led the Harbor Art Guild, a group of about 50 artists, for five years. He said that if he were to step down as president of the board he would have concerns about the future of the nonprofit, a group he says is critical to the “visual progress” of downtown Aberdeen.
“The reason I’m still president is because nobody else wants to do it,” he said in an interview on Thursday.
According to Orr, the Rain Glow Festival, a color-themed gathering of artists and tourists that lights up Aberdeen’s streets on a summer evening, drew 4,000 people last year. He said the Harbor Art Guild took over planning of the Aberdeen Art Walk from another group this year.
Orr said the Rain Glow Festival costs about $30,000 to produce, and he was paid $3,000 for his time producing the event, which took months. Last year Harbor Art Guild was reimbursed about $7,000 for the Rain Glow Festival.
“They have this misunderstanding that I’m making a fortune on it,” he said, adding that one festival put him $5,000 in the hole.
Pieraccini and Sidor said at Wednesday’s meeting that the city wants to work on other solutions to fund the festival, but didn’t list specific options for doing so.
Pieraccini, who recently lost the 2023 mayoral election to Orr by four votes, said she has “no animosity toward Doug. I think he’s going to be a wonderful mayor,” she said. “I want the Rain Glow. I was devastated because of the RCW and the city charter.”
“There’s nothing that says we can’t bring it up again and find a workaround,” Sidor said.
Orr said the festival this year is “up in the air.”
“An event this large, it can’t be in question where you are getting the money from until the last minute. I can’t risk doing it thinking that they might decide to fund me,” he said.
He added, “If the council and the city doesn’t want to have that kind of event and they don’t want to do those kind of things, then that’s on them. I’m not going to beg them to allow me to waste months of my time putting on an event they don’t want.”
Contact reporter Clayton Franke at 406-552-3917 or clayton.franke@thedailyworld.com.
