It is no secret that I have a sig­nif­i­cant lack of regard for the gov­er­nance of Coquille as admin­is­tered by city man­ager, Ter­rence O’Connor. Before elab­o­rat­ing, let me say that more than once Mayor Brit­ton has men­tioned how much he would like to see more pub­lic involve­ment in city coun­cil meet­ings and mat­ters per­tain­ing to the city. To that end, sev­eral cit­i­zens includ­ing myself have made earnest attempts to obtain pub­lic infor­ma­tion from the city in order to actively par­tic­i­pate in city deci­sion mak­ing. Regret­tably, being armed with, what should be pub­lic infor­ma­tion, in advance of a city coun­cil meet­ing is not eas­ily done.

Sim­ple things, like pol­icy and pro­ce­dure man­u­als for the city, the police depart­ment and other depart­ments such as finance and pub­lic works are not avail­able at the library. Many other cities pro­vide copies of these ref­er­ence mate­ri­als at libraries or even offer them online, but not Coquille. Today, Jean Ivey, edi­tor of The Sen­tinel has penned her own frus­tra­tions with get­ting pub­lic infor­ma­tion in an edi­to­r­ial regard­ing records requests adopted by the coun­cil. How, Mayor Brit­ton, are we sup­posed to par­tic­i­pate in our local gov­er­nance if we are not given access to infor­ma­tion that affects us?

There is a com­mon dilemma in the man­age­ment field wherein the prin­ci­pal, in this case the cit­i­zens, or more accu­rately the city coun­cil, hire an agent or city man­ager to over­see the busi­ness of the city. Since none of us are present forty hours a week to over­see the actions and busi­ness being con­ducted by the city man­ager we must rely on other means to assess performance.

Do we have clean run­ning water? Are the sew­ers work­ing? Are emer­gency ser­vices in place? Are the bills paid? Are essen­tial city ser­vices pro­vided ade­quately and promptly? Can the city man­ager write grant requests? Is he help­ful? Is he pro­fes­sional, cour­te­ous, respon­sive and con­sid­er­ate of the peo­ple who pay his salary?

Per­haps the man­ager is barely squeak­ing by. Maybe the city could do much bet­ter, have lower unem­ploy­ment, bet­ter schools, fewer vacan­cies, a bet­ter qual­ity of life. Job per­for­mance can be hard to assess and hence the above men­tioned dilemma known as the principal-agent the­ory.

One way for tax­pay­ing cit­i­zens to make informed deci­sions relat­ing to principal-agent the­ory is to have access to pub­lic records. Before each coun­cil meet­ing each coun­cilor is given a packet in advance of the next meet­ing and if cit­i­zens could also receive an advance copy, with­out pay­ing a huge fee and fil­ing a records request, we might be bet­ter pre­pared for these meetings.

The city bud­get also posted in this weeks paper indi­cates that next year, the city plans to spend even more on the police depart­ment, $827,707 or 34% of the gen­eral fund. Obvi­ously, the city regards most of its 4,200 cit­i­zens as crim­i­nals, but will hap­pily take tax dol­lars from everyone.

So, get­ting back to the principal-agent the­ory, why is the City of Coquille so reluc­tant to share pub­lic infor­ma­tion? What do they want to hide?