Wagging the WAB, swabbing the WAG

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

WAGGING THE WAB, SWABBING THE WAG: Bellingham, as we’re fond of pointing out, has two waterfronts; and the city supports two citizens’ advisory panels empowered to study them. Bellingham City Council last week stumbled a bit in further empowering them.

The Lake Whatcom Watershed Advisory Board was formed nearly a decade ago in response to a citizen’s initiative to acquire lands around the reservoir in an effort to preserve them from creeping urbanization. The board is intended to provide city policymakers with advice on potential land acquisitions, as well as recommendations on how the acquisition program itself should be managed and maintained.

Comprised of citizens who by their résumés and long hours of volunteer efforts care deeply for Lake Whatcom reservoir, the WAB recently completed an exhaustive report outlining policy recommendations for the protection and restoration of this impaired water body.

The WAB recommended accelerating the city’s acquisitions program. Yet, the purchase of land at market rates is one of the costliest (albeit permanent) solutions for protecting the reservoir. To date, efforts have been mostly serendipitous—acquiring a parcel here and there as they’re offered, much as the city handles its Greenways acquisitions. The WAB offered suggestions on incentives and instruments that might speed these acquisitions.

As council considered WAB recommendations, they questioned whether the group might offer additional, equally effective, less costly recommendations apart from land acquisitions to preserve and protect Lake Whatcom.

Well, that is outside the scope of what the WAB was chartered to explore.

To get a more comprehensive set of policy recommendations, the duties and activities of the WAB would have to be expanded. After a small amount of false starts, council agreed to ask WAB members if—suitably empowered with a broader range of goals—they might wish to revise and expand their policy recommendations.

Younger than the WAB by a few years, the Waterfront Advisory Group grew out of the efforts of the Waterfront Futures Group, a broad-based collection of citizens and professionals who studied the 12 miles of Bellingham’s marine shoreline and issued a visioning report on how those lands might be preserved and enhanced. The WFG report and recommendations are widely considered a wise, guiding light on development of the city’s shoreline.

The WFG, sponsored primarily by the city, morphed into the WAG, jointly sponsored but controlled primarily by the Port of Bellingham. In supporting the WAG, the port strenuously held that no member from that earlier brain trust—the WFG—should serve on it, a requirement later relaxed… in one instance.

It’s worth exploring the WAG for the light it sheds on institutional differences between the city and port.

Most municipal boards, panels and commissions—like the WAB—are comprised of citizens recommended by the mayor and approved by council. They provide periodic reports that guide COB policy leaders.

The WAG is different. Its members are appointed by the mayor and the port’s executive director. They report directly (and often solely) to the administrative branches. They have yet to issue a single comprehensive report or policy framework. Whereas most city boards and commissions have memberships of active residents and the spectrum of their interests, the WAG is more tokenized—here a representative of the city, here the county, there the port, over there tokens of the environmental and business communities. With the recent addition of members from transportation and affordable housing sectors, the WAG has taken on an increasingly institutionalized feel.

The WAG serves to gloss the port’s top-down version of a public process—they’re the “citizens,” carefully selected for their allegiance to port goals, neutered in their ability to influence those goals, who are spoonfed the dismal documents the port can crow afterward received “favorable citizen review.” It’s a sham, it’s a lie—the equivalent of throwing a gunnysack over the head of a genuine, open public process and beating it with a wrecking bar until it stops moving—and it is instructive and not at all coincidental that the members of the WAG most considered “loose cannons” and “not team players” come from the environmental community and, in that single instance, from a more generous role on the WFG.

Team spirit cracked in January, as the site master planning phase looms, with those “loose cannons” complaining of their limited role in developing planning guidelines and development regulations for the waterfront district. Several expressed frustration that, while they’ve had chances aplenty to read regurgitated reports, they’ve had no meaningful opportunity to comment on specific issues raised in those reports… by design.

Observing this, City Council member Jack Weiss last week introduced a proposal to further empower the WAG so they may begin to more resemble a city board, going so far as to—gasp!— formally request advice from the Waterfront Advisory Group.

Significantly, two out of three WAG members present for Weiss’ proposal are among those members who champion a limited (even eliminated) role for their group (of those two, one has attended perhaps three of their monthly meetings in three years on the WAG). Equally significant, Weiss’ proposal drew immediate pushback from the mayor and those council members most intent on sealing a city/port fiat on the central waterfront, no doubt wishing to avoid another doomsday tantrum from the Port of Bellingham in response to efforts to make the public process more inclusive… and honest.

Jack’s proposal became quickly enmeshed in a web of interlocal bureaucracy that will likely take the entire master planning phase to untangle.

Jack just wanted to ask the WAG for their opinion. Our question to Jack is, given this level of dysfunction, Why?