PORT ANGELES — The Port Angeles City Council has approved a four-year contract with the Clallam Business Incubator on a 4-0 vote, with three members abstaining.
The contract, which lists no monetary amount, was pulled from the consent agenda for the June 24 meeting for more review.
City Finance Director Yvonne Ziomkowski said that the incubator’s allotment will be about $85,000, as it is in this year’s contract.
On Tuesday, the contract was approved by Mayor Gary Braun and Councilmen Dan Di Guilio, Don Perry and Larry Williams.
Deputy Mayor Betsy Wharton and Councilwomen Cherie Kidd and Karen Rogers abstained from the vote.
The incubator contract will begin Jan. 1, 2009, to be renewed annually through Dec. 31, 2012, with either party able to terminate it with 90 days notice.
Rogers serves on the incubator’s board of directors.
“Although it is not a paid position, and I have no potential for financial gain from it, just to be extra careful, I will abstain from the vote,” she said.
Wharton, who was participating on a speaker phone, said she couldn’t hear well enough.
Williams asked Kidd to abstain because she serves on the board of the Economic Development Council.
“There is enough interaction between the EDC board and the CBI that I thought that was appropriate,” Williams said.
“Cherie is the representative from the Port Angeles Business Association to the EDC council, and the bylaws of PABA indicate that in order to be their representative, you can’t say or do anything with out the authorization of the business association.”
Although both City Manager Mark Madsen and City Attorney Bill Bloor said that Kidd legally could vote on the issue, she abstained.
The only difference in the contract approved on Tuesday from the one presented on June 24 was that Madsen was no longer listed as the president of the Clallam Business Incubator board.
Instead the line for the president’s signature is blank and a line appears for incubator board vice president Tom Keegan — president of Peninsula College — to sign.
It was Kidd who, on June 24, requested that the proposed incubator contract be pulled from the consent agenda — which allows routine approval — saying she wanted to review it before considering approval.
The incubator is an economic development strategy which is made to help developing businesses prosper, director Jim Haguewood said.
Since the incubator was established in June 2006, it has assisted 10 business, Haguewood said.
The incubator has six resident clients.
“We have had three businesses exit the incubator,” Haguewood said.
“One of those was a successful exit, and the other two are still in business, but the incubator wasn’t the right place for them.”
At that June meeting, Wharton said that she saw too much similarity between the incubator and the EDC.
“Why do we have two agencies doing the same job?” she asked then.
On Tuesday, prior to approving the contract, the council heard Haguewood, and the EDC’s director, Linda Rotmark, present information on their agencies’ goals and purposes.
“The EDC’s goal is much more global than ours,” Haguewood said.
“The incubator is a component of that, but they are looking at a much larger picture.”
Rotmark said that although the EDC might refer people to apply the incubator the perspective of the EDC was much larger.
It’s perspective is to develop the economic structure of the whole county.
