PORT ANGELES — Participants at the Port Angeles Business Association’s Tuesday breakfast meeting heard a pitch to have $500,000 in Opportunity Fund money pour into the Clallam County Economic Development Council (EDC) over three years.
The plan to pay for two new staff members through 2017 — a doubling of employees — with the fund’s 0.09-cent sales tax proceeds was outlined by County Commissioner and EDC board member Jim McEntire before about 40 meeting attendees.
Former County Commissioner Ron Richards has filed a petition against the county ordinance that enables the draw-down of Opportunity Fund money for the staff members, effectively freezing the funding and seeking to bring Ordinance 898 to a vote of the people through a referendum.
The ordinance, spearheaded by McEntire, eliminates the Opportunity Fund Board, an advisory panel that made recommendations to commissioners on expenditures from the fund.
McEntire, also a former Port of Port Angeles commissioner, drew heat for the funding proposal from the public at a commissioners’ meeting last week before commissioners by a 2-1 vote adopted the EDC strategic plan drafted by McEntire and tapped the Opportunity Fund to pay for more EDC staff.
“The dilemma is that with [two] people, there’s only so much you can do,” he said during a half-hour presentation.
“The design of the EDC board is to have the center of gravity in the private sector,” McEntire told the group.
Plans call for members of the EDC board to consist of representatives of area tribes, Peninsula College, Olympic Medical Center or Forks Community Hospital, the Port of Port Angeles, Clallam’s three cities, a county representative from each of the three commissioners districts, a county commissioner or administrator, possibly a non-voting “senior policy adviser,” and a City Council member, city manager or mayor representing all three cities, according to a handout McEntire distributed before the meeting.
The board, which would be cut from 28 to about 16 members, would be chaired by a person who would be separately recruited and appointed by the board.
The EDC board will meet at 10:15 a.m. Thursday in Room 208 of the North Olympic Peninsula Skills Center, 905 W. Ninth St., Port Angeles.
Bill Greenwood, EDC executive director, said in an interview Tuesday that the board’s makeup will be a primary topic of discussion.
Breakfast meeting participant Harry Bell, chief forester at Green Crow, a Port Angeles timberland investment and management services company, noted there were no private-sector representatives on the board.
City Councilwoman Cherie Kidd said the board has had numerous government representatives because that’s where the EDC’s “sustaining” money comes from.
Greenwood, who did not attend the commissioners’ meeting when the EDC funding was approved, also did not attend Tuesday’s breakfast meeting.
“I’ve been advised by the board to do the work and not be necessarily the person out there explaining it,” he said Tuesday.
Greenwood said the EDC had at least three employees from 2006-2013, including two part-time contract workers, before being pared to 1.5 employees in 2014.
He said he came up with four employees as a target after he looked at other EDCs in counties such as Yakima and Thurston, both with populations three times that of Clallam, and “after looking at what the task at hand was.”
Greenwood said the Clallam EDC’s projected 2015 budget is $236,000 not including the $200,000 in Opportunity Fund money that county commissioners dedicated to 2015 expenditures.
Greenwood, a former investment banker and manufacturing company owner hired as EDC executive director in March 2014, said private sector support for the EDC has increased fourfold since October, from $11,000 to $40,000.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
