PORT ANGELES — The Port Angeles City Council narrowed down the applicants for a vacant seat this week.
Nine people applied for the seat vacated by Brendan Meyer. Each remaining council member choose their top three candidates, and the three people with the most votes Tuesday night were chosen to move on to the next phase of the selection process.
“I went back and listened to what we did last time, and I think it worked very well, so we’ll try it again,” Mayor Kate Dexter said.
Among the applicants, Jon Hamilton received five votes, Christy Holy garnered four votes and Laurel Cripe got three votes.
The three will be interviewed during the council’s next meeting Sept. 2. The council has until Sept. 28 to fill the vacancy.
Also Tuesday, the council approved a shift in responsibility of the design work for fish barrier culverts at the intersection of Ennis Creek and East Ennis Creek Road from the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe to the city.
“The City and Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe have been working toward the correction of fish barrier culverts located at the intersection of Ennis Creek and East Ennis Creek Road through an Inter-Local Agreement initiated in 2024 which defines responsibilities for each party to ensure a successful design project,” according to the agenda memo.
“I’m really excited about this,” Dexter said. “This is a really important step, and it’s really exciting to have a creek inside the city limits that could potentially be fully restored. I’m hopeful we might be able to see a pretty amazing creek inside city limits.”
The project has reached 60 percent of the design phase but has exhausted the tribe’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grant, the agenda memo states.
In other business, the council heard the first reading of an update to the utility base rate ordinance.
“City Council prioritized charging a base rate to all vacant properties as well as to customers that had voluntary disconnection from the system in the 2025-2026 Strategic Plan,” according to the agenda memo. “On Dec. 19, Council adopted Ordinance 3744 that amended section 13.16.010, allowing staff to implement the changes to charge base rates to these properties.”
The ordinance update is to clarify the move, the council was told.
“If the city is incurring the base rate cost to bring services to the parcel, we should continue to charge the base rate,” council member Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin said. “I’m really proud of us as a city for addressing this issue. This is a step in the right direction to address what I see as a freeloader issue.”
The council also approved a memorandum of understanding with the North Olympic Peninsula Recompete Coalition.
“The Distressed Area Recompete Pilot Program (Recompete Pilot Program) was created to invest in distressed communities to create and connect people in those communities to good jobs, using the Prime-Age Employment Gap as an indicator of economic distress, which accounts for prime-age workers who have stopped looking for jobs and left the labor force as well as those who are currently unemployed,” according to the agenda memo.
Council member Drew Schwab is on the committee, and the council decided to assign an alternate to the committee once there are seven members of council again.
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Reporter Emily Hanson can be reached by email at emily.hanson@peninsuladailynews.com.
