A speaker at last week’s Board of Com­mis­sion­ers meet­ing talked about how expe­ri­enced employ­ees are an invalu­able resource. The speaker, Don Beebe, expressed what a trav­esty it was not to tap that wealth of expe­ri­ence dur­ing the recent reor­ga­ni­za­tion at the Road Department.

From the out­side look­ing in, unfor­tu­nately the only per­spec­tive avail­able to the pub­lic given the opac­ity of the Board’s deci­sion, the dis­re­gard for expe­ri­enced input reflects an arro­gant dis­dain for the cit­i­zens as well as the employ­ees and has the sharp acrid scent of hubris. How dare the Board behave as if the cit­i­zens have noth­ing of value to con­tribute on such an impor­tant topic as pub­lic safety?

Evi­dently the Coquille City Coun­cil has no more regard for the col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence of the vot­ers than the Board. Cer­tainly we can hope that their choice of Matt Muenchrath to the Coun­cil will ben­e­fit all the cit­i­zens despite their own mediocre performance.

Still it was their choice, just six peo­ple not the elec­torate. These same six peo­ple have presided while a wildly unpop­u­lar and appar­ently incom­pe­tent police chief was allowed to run roughshod through­out the City and his depart­ment with­out any man­age­ment or over­sight from the city man­ager for years.

These same six peo­ple con­tinue to allow the city man­ager to behave as if he were not respon­si­ble for the many police depart­ment fail­ings. They have pro­vided no guid­ance to the city man­ager while an unsolved mur­der, a crit­i­cally injured mem­ber of the pub­lic, thou­sands of dol­lars stolen and the mis­use of City com­put­ers hap­pened right under his nose.

Once again I detect the scent of hubris. Arbi­trary coun­cil rules enacted years ago were used to wrest con­trol from and jus­tify ignor­ing the expe­ri­ence of the public.

Assum­ing the Board of Com­mis­sion­ers ignores pub­lic tes­ti­mony and out­cry and goes through with the Road Depart­ment lay­offs the already high unem­ploy­ment rate in Coquille will jump even higher. The lay­off will effect schools, busi­nesses and fur­ther reduce our tax base. Will the ever vig­i­lant and alert Coquille City Coun­cil develop a plan to deal with these inevitable changes or come up with knee jerk reac­tions just like the Board?

Resource deple­tion is not why bud­gets get tight or soci­eties fail. They fail because lead­ers do not adapt to resource deple­tion. The Board has not responded or adapted to chang­ing eco­nomic con­di­tions, instead they have reacted, fran­ti­cally, wildly in a state of panic. Reac­tion is not lead­er­ship it is the absence of leadership.

Instead of blam­ing the leg­is­la­ture or plead­ing with a large cor­po­ra­tion to ride in like a white knight and res­cue the county like a damsel in dis­tress there are many solu­tions avail­able to enable local sus­tain­abil­ity that are much more dig­ni­fied. These solu­tions will require adap­ta­tion and a will­ing­ness to think out of the box but they do exist.

Energy is one way to become self-sustaining and fund pub­lic ser­vices such as road main­te­nance, pub­lic health and edu­ca­tion. Five megawatts of dis­trib­uted gen­er­at­ing power oper­at­ing at full capac­ity can earn $3M annual rev­enue. Using a ratio of 1.4 and assum­ing a AAA credit rat­ing, $3M qual­i­fies for $2.1M in debt ser­vice and trans­lates into $19.2M financ­ing at 9.5% inter­est although a bank will limit a loan to 80% of cost.

Cen­tral­ized wind farms cost about $1.5M per megawatt exclud­ing the cost of trans­mis­sion. At that cost $19M in financ­ing would pay for more than 12MW of power gen­er­a­tion and might pro­vide some insight into why energy is pop­u­lar on Wall Street. The net earn­ings $.9M after pay­ing debt ser­vice assumes a 20-year loan but dis­trib­uted gen­er­a­tion is less expen­sive than cen­tral­ized power allow­ing a much faster payoff.

Gen­er­at­ing 5 or 10MW of power locally instead of import­ing power and export­ing dol­lars to investor owned util­i­ties is just one of many ways to adapt the resources we have to suit our chang­ing needs. These are by no means sim­ple deals to struc­ture but they are done suc­cess­fully in the US and Europe, all it takes is com­pe­tent and adap­tive leadership.

If we invite the col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence of our cit­i­zens and the peo­ple we work with every­day rather than keep­ing every­one in the dark many unique solu­tions will have the oppor­tu­nity to present them­selves. Hubris is not adap­tive and the very act of exclud­ing the very peo­ple affected by a deci­sion from the deci­sion process is polar­iz­ing and invites mis­trust. For this rea­son, I believe Stuffle­bean has impaired his own abil­ity to lead and should resign as interim road­mas­ter and give up his liai­son assign­ment to the Road Department.