PORT ANGELES — Port Angeles’ six city council candidates answered questions Wednesday about how they would approach various issues facing the city.
The candidates — Position 5 appointed incumbent Amy Miller, a social worker, and challenger Jim Haguewood, a real estate broker; Position 6 incumbent Navarra Carr, a law student, and challenger Mark Karjalainen, a firefighter/paramedic, and Position 7 incumbent, Deputy Mayor Brendan Meyer, a self-employed marketing consultant, and challenger Kalli Jones, a former pediatric nurse practitioner turned stay-at-home mom — took questions during a meeting of the Port Angeles Noon Rotary at Asian Buffet Restaurant.
Candidates were asked if they would support funding school infrastructure without also increasing the tax burden on local residents, specifically whether they would support bonds and levies.
Carr, Haguewood, Meyer and Miller all said as council members they would support additional school bond measures to support schools and offered other options for potentially raising funds. Jones and Karjalainen did not provide responses to the question.
“I think we can also be better advocates for schools in our community at the state,” Carr said, adding that she hoped to put support for schools on the council’s legislative priorities list for lobbying the state government.
“(We can) stand behind our school districts to really say that funding for our schools and our teachers and our facilities is important, and the state should be giving more funding towards rural communities like ours,” she said.
Meyer said he supported school bond efforts but wanted any tax increases to come from voters.
“Any voter initiative way to increase funds, I am 100 percent in support of for schools,” Meyer said. “I’m not really keen on doing property tax increases and councilmanic increases of taxes. I really prefer the voters to be the ones to decide whether or not to raise their own taxes.”
Miller said improving the city’s schools would help to draw additional workforce to the area.
“I have been part of hiring of different organizations and have watched professionals come, be a great fit in the organization and have to bail on a job because they don’t want their kids coming to the schools,” Miller said.
Haguewood also said he would support future bond efforts. He was critical of the current council for making decisions he said limited economic growth.
Haguewood — who has operated a short-term rental of his own — said the council’s moratorium on new STRs and increasing fees for certain kinds of construction have limited economic growth.
“Pushing on those buttons saying we don’t want to see that happen has a negative impact on economic growth,” Haguewood said of the moratorium. “My role as a city council member is to promote economic growth strategies to build a larger tax base that then generates income for the school district.”
On the subject of homelessness, Karjalainen and Jones both said they supported the “broken windows theory” of policing, which states the prosecution of lower-level crimes creates an atmosphere of authority and lawfulness and acts as a deterrent against higher-level crimes.
Karjalainen said Port Angeles could consider setting up its own municipal court to prosecute crimes rather than relying on Clallam County as the city currently does.
“I think right now, the prosecuting attorney that we have gets paid $1.2 million for jail services and prosecutorial services and is doing nothing for our city ordinance code enforcement and is doing very little for prosecuting minor crimes,” Karjalainen said.
Homeless people should not be demonized, Karjalainen said, but should be directed toward the services necessary to help them, specifically citing mental health and substance abuse issues.
Jones, who has been similarly critical of the current council’s approach to public safety, also said she disagreed with the housing-first approach to homelessness, which focuses on providing housing to homeless people before addressing issues like substance abuse and mental health.
“From a medical standpoint, we do not treat symptoms, we treat the root cause of the disease. If you come and see me for strep throat, I’m not going to help you at all if I send you home with an ibuprofen,” Jones said. “We need to be approaching these problems from the source of the problem rather than trying to treat the symptoms first.”
Miller — who created the city’s REdisCOVERY program, which places a social worker with law enforcement to help respond to mental health and substance abuse cases — said she disagreed with the broken windows theory and said the city needs to create spaces where ill, homeless people could go to safely recover and programs to help intervene with people suffering from those issues.
Working with local law enforcement, Miller said she learned, “There has to be some enforcement. People do need to be held accountable and I think that there is reasons why our law enforcement put more energy into higher impact crimes.
“By focusing on some of the intervention, we free up some of their workload so they can focus on why they became a police officer.”
Meyer said, as a council member, he had voted to use money the city received from lawsuits related to the manufacture and distribution of opioid medications at the heart of the nation’s drug crisis to help support grassroots organizations that wanted to tackle the issue, but that the council ultimately decided to have the city keep and use those funds.
“I’m more of a housing-first advocate,” Meyer said. “If you put somebody in a house, that might be one of the big things that’s making them feel desperate and out, and unable to climb out of the hole that they’re in.”
As a final question, candidates were asked to state their vision for the future in 10 words or less.
Haguewood: “Four years from now, we’re not talking about homelessness and housing.”
Karjalainen: “Tapping into the economic driver of tourism.”
Jones: “Safe, healthy and prosperous.”
Miller: “Less vacant buildings and vacant land.”
Carr: “Compassionate response, economic vitality, strong downtown.”
Meyer: “A plan for the future, to secure a future, infrastructure and housing.”
Port Angeles City Council members are nonpartisan, do not represent a particular district or area of the city and are elected to serve four-year terms.
Election Day is Nov. 7, and ballots were mailed to voters on Tuesday. Voter registration is available until 8 p.m. on Election Day, but online voter registration ends Oct. 30. Online voter registration and additional election information is available at votewa.gov.
________
Reporter Peter Segall can be reached at peter.segall@peninsuladailynews.com.
