We in Sweet Home have suddenly found ourselves in a situation we haven’t experienced in 18 years with the forced retirement of City Manager Craig Martin: going in a very new direction.
As reported on page 1, council members voted 5-1 last week to end Martin’s contract with the city.
The elephant-in-the-room question here is: Why?
Why would City Council members suddenly effectively dismiss a city administrator whose tenure is nearly three times the average length of those in his position in cities today?
Why would they make this move without even giving Martin an evaluation over the course of the last three years?
Why would they want to lose a guy who is well-respected by many other leaders in this community and in the region?
The short answer is: We can’t say.
Having covered every public meeting the council has held in the last decade-plus, most of them with a reporter sitting in the council chambers in person, we are really at a loss for a logical reason for their move other than that they’ve decided they want someone else.
Since no one has directly criticized Martin’s performance in any of the open council sessions we’ve covered – we’re largely left to conjecture to fill in the blanks on what’s evident in the public arena – which is not much.
At the risk of sounding disparaging, this dismissal – and behind all the spin and happy talk, that’s what this is – doesn’t make sense. The numbers do not add up, no matter how we look at the available facts.
When someone’s employment is terminated, it’s usually based on negatives, so let’s see what they might be.
Frankly, there aren’t many that we can see, especially given the nature of the city manager’s position.
Yes, we hear occasional murmurings from citizens about city staff performance over the years. But for a publicly funded institution, we believe Sweet Home has gotten a pretty competent, efficient performance from our public servants under Martin’s leadership as a whole.
In our staff’s 60-plus years of combined experience in covering public affairs, we can say that in an organization the size of Sweet Home’s staff, it would be almost unheard-of not to have a few ruffled feathers and “I saw a guy in a yellow vest leaning on a shovel”–type complaints from the masses, and we haven’t heard that many. We don’t think management is a problem here.
Was it incompetence? We don’t see that, either. Water flows from our faucets, the police answer calls for service (unlike other towns, where they send you forms to fill out following a theft), our parks are improving, the library is still lending books, streets are getting new blacktop, etc. With Martin’s departure from City Hall, after nearly 19 years at the helm, Sweet Home loses a city administrator who, in a close look at past years, has generally guided this city with a very steady hand.
In almost all the cases we can think of, Martin has been very accommodating to City Council members’ wishes, at least in public meetings. Unlike other city administrators we staffers have experienced, he’s not into power plays, into posturing. When he has asserted himself, it usually has been to clarify or to let councilors know they were running in what was, in his opinion, a dangerous direction. Martin didn’t always enjoy the disagreements that did take place, but in general he’s been very professional in captaining the city ship.
Frankly, if there were never any disagreements between council members and the city manager, we’d be concerned about that because something would be awry on one or both ends. While antagonism based on personalities is certainly not acceptable in public affairs, a rubber-stamp council isn’t what we want either. Until recently, this balance has been one of the reasons why Sweet Home has had a healthy city government – recognized as such by our neighboring communities. If someone thinks Craig Martin is incompetent, we’re waiting to hear why.
We’ve heard occasional criticisms of the city – with a focus on Martin – for lacking a vigorous strategy to build Sweet Home’s economy. We’re as eager as any to see Sweet Home grow economically, to attract business. But with a thriving economic boom town 15 miles down the road – that’s 30 miles round-trip closer to the freeway, we’re not playing with the strongest hand, strategically, especially for blue collar-type manufacturing that requires materials and components to be shipped in and out.
Martin has been a zealous and key player in local efforts to improve economic conditions in Sweet Home through use of our natural resources, which is certainly one piece of the puzzle for us. To avoid excessive length of this editorial, we’ve offered examples of his activity in the box to the right.
So, what else? Has Martin been overpaid? His salary of a little over $104,000 a year for doing this (according to the 2015-16 city budget posted on its website, http://www.sweet-home.or.us), may be slightly high for a city of our size, according to national figures. But given his 18 years of experience and the relatively smooth sailing Sweet Home has enjoyed for over a decade, would it be preferable to pay somebody else less to stay a few years and never gain the knowledge of the community that Martin has.
A little on-line research reveals that, in recent weeks, two Oregon cities have been seeking to fill city administrator positions. Sublimity, population 2,760 (less than one-third of Sweet Home’s) has been offering a salary range of $65,000 – $75,000, “plus excellent benefits” to manage a staff of six. Yachats, population 703, has been offering $65,000 – $80,000.
Here are some positives, in addition to some of those we’ve already mentioned.
n During Martin’s tenure, we haven’t heard a lot about former employees suing the city for this and that. Staffers tell us that he’s a good man, even though they sit on opposite sides in contract negotiations.
n As far as we know – and we, as a newspaper, attend nearly every open meeting and keep a pretty close eye on things, our city is in good standing with the federal and state governments in terms of our obligations.
n We aren’t in a financial crisis, such as our neighbor Lebanon found itself in a few years ago, because this city manager, his staff and City Council have planned well and disbursed funds intelligently to meet our needs. Everything has been open and honest, from all that we’ve seen. We’ve gotten grants for hundreds of thousands of dollars for our library, parks, infrastructure and more under Martin’s management, thanks to his ability to see opportunities and, sometimes, think outside the box.
n In addition to making things happen for the city and in the city, Craig Martin been a regular volunteer in the Beautification Committee’s efforts to maintain the Main Street median – on his own time. He’s helped pave the way for summer aquatic competitions – long-distance swimming, water polo and a triathlon series, which bring hundreds of visitors from all over the West to Foster Lake. He’s flipped burgers at the Oregon Jamboree, served as water polo coach at Sweet Home High School and as a swimming official in local and district meets, managed the city’s Youth Advisory Council, and more than we can mention here.
We wonder how aware City Council members have been of Martin’s activities, other than hearing his reports at council meetings. The reason we do is because we’ve rarely seen any of the current council participating, even by showing up, at any of the above and in our box at the left.
Our point here isn’t to excoriate council members for lack of connection with what’s really going on in the city, but when we’ve attended the Chamber of Commerce awards banquet, the Boys and Girls Club Auction, Sportsman’s Holiday activities, the Sunshine Spaghetti Dinner and auction, the Christmas Tree Auction, the Day of Prayer, and other social settings where the citizens of Sweet Home come together in large numbers, City Council presence has been noticeably thin.
When the city held a workshop for neighbors of the Weyerhaeuser mill property, attended by more than 100 local citizens, most of whom lived in the affected area. When Craig Martin spoke to the crowd, he wasn’t speaking to most of our City Council because they weren’t there.
We must add that, more recently, there has been one notable exception: Jeff Goodwin, who has appeared at various public events with some regularity, but if the council as a whole were really interested in what’s happening in the community, it seems reasonable to expect that they’d be involved.
When council members’ interaction with the public is limited to their own private circles of engagement – work and volunteer efforts, clubs, church, etc. – they’re missing opportunities to engage with those who may not commonly travel in those spheres. They’re not superhuman, so we can’t expect them to be everywhere, but if they really wanted to see our City Manager in action outside of council meetings and, maybe, visits to his office, participating in some of these economic development efforts at least, would be a good way to do it and show people know they care.
When we talk about releasing a respected, competent, highly experienced individual because – they just decided they want someone else, we have to question the depth of analysis that went into this decision.
Thinking as optimistically as possible as we ponder our empty city manager’s chair, we could be fortunate and get a new manager who has vision and commitment and expertise that go beyond the dollar signs on a paycheck. But, having experienced the revolving-door series of city managers in other cities of Sweet Home’s size, most of whom care only about dollars and moving up the ladder, we can only hope.
There’s a lot more we could say about this. Skip the happy talk from council members when you read our report and the reality of this becomes much more apparent, despite how the council wants to spin it.
The bottom line is, this move makes no sense at any level other than the fact that some councilors appear to have developed an unexplained dissatisfaction with Martin, who in telling them the facts about some of the ideas they might have broached to him, may have crossed them.
Well, that’s his job.
We say he’s done it well, but the majority of our City Council obviously doesn’t see it that way.
Craig Martinís Role in Economic Development
Martin was instrumental in the Governor’s Solutions Team’s efforts – representatives of a wide variety of government agencies working together with local citizens to find ways to make better economic use of the natural resources around us. He was one of the main players in the successful effort to have the Conservation Fund choose Sweet Home as a gateway community to the national forest for a Livability Assessment Report.
Both of these are efforts, paid for by state and federal government, respectively, to give Sweet Home an economic boost. Martin was one of the reasons they’ve happened.
He’s also been a committed member of the Visit Linn Coalition, an ad hoc group of city managers, chamber officials and others interested in seeing Linn County – particularly east Linn County – profit from the attractions outsiders feel (or should feel) toward our natural resources.
He helped found and is a charter Steering Committee member of the Sweet Home Area Revitalization Effort (SHARE), the economic-development arm of SHEDG. That group has met monthly since more than 100 outraged community members gathered in 2008 (in three meetings organized by Martin) to respond to a slap-down from an assessment team from the Oregon Downtown Association who described Sweet Home’s core as “worn, blighted, cheap and tacky” before moving on to distribute grant funding to Lebanon, Philomath, Toledo and Newport for downtown improvements.
Over those years, as revenue has been available from the Oregon Jamboree through its mother organization, SHEDG, SHARE has distributed funds for downtown building facade improvements, mural creation and maintenance, holiday lights, beautification efforts, pop-up leases for would-be entrepreneurs, a downtown retail market analysis for Sweet Home, Economic Development Director Brian Hoffman, and more. Martin has been a significant contributor to making all of that happen.