One can hope that the cit­i­zens of Coquille will be well served with Matt Muenchrath on the coun­cil. Odds are good that he will prob­a­bly read and study up on the mat­ters brought before the coun­cil whereas it is often ques­tion­able whether the other coun­cilors do. He may even pay atten­tion dur­ing coun­cil meet­ings and not nod off. He may even ask rel­e­vant ques­tions and may not vote in lock step with every­one else as is usu­ally the case.

Or, he may be more of the same only more atten­tive. Who knows whether he will work with or against the mayor or nod in affir­ma­tion for the bland and lack lus­ter per­for­mance and mea­ger man­age­r­ial skills of the stand­ing city man­ager. Take note that four of the votes Muenchrath received allowed a city man­ager to retain an incom­pe­tent police chief for years to the detri­ment of the city and had thou­sands of dol­lars stolen right from under his nose.

Appar­ently, the city man­ager will escape rebuke for his glow­ing fail­ures because the coun­cil is asleep on the job as usual or so mired in mis­di­rected loy­alty to the police depart­ment sim­ply because they are the police depart­ment and not because they earned it. Thank good­ness the new chief came along before another mem­ber of the pub­lic was injured or more money absconded with and to reveal the incom­pe­tence of the for­mer chief and his neg­li­gent reten­tion by the city manager.

Hope­fully, Muenchrath is not just more of the same, deter­mined to main­tain the sta­tus quo for the few it serves because if he is, noth­ing will improve until a real city man­ager comes along, because we can’t expect any direc­tion from the council.