Longview council hires $250-an-hour consultant to draft 2025-26 budget

Costs growing out of firing of City Manager Kris Swanson will exceed $500,000, but they're likely to continue growing

Ka-Ching.

Costs and delays are continuing to mount for Longview taxpayers in the wake of the City Council’s March firing of City Manager Kris Swanson and subsequent staff departures. 

The latest cost came on Tuesday, when the council agreed on a 4-3 vote to hire a $250-an-hour consultant to help it prepare its 2025-26 budget because the staff lacks time and expertise to draft its spending plan on time, assistant city manager Chris Collins told the council.

The professional services contract with Exigy Consulting of Seattle is not to exceed 20 hours a week and total cost of $120,000.  In addition to helping craft a budget, Exigy will help the city decide whether to hire a permanent finance director, Collins said.

The city has not had a separate finance director for six years. Swanson and Kurt Sacha both served that role as well while serving as city managers. Both had extensive budgeting experience, Swanson as an auditor and Sacha as the city finance director before he became city manager in 2018.

Noting those dual roles, Councilwomen Mary Alice Wallis and Angie Wean reminded the council that supporters of Jim Duscha, the city’s retired police chief,  vouched for his budgeting skills when the council’s four-member majority appointed him as Swanson’s interim replacement in March. This was a major concern of opponents of the move.

Wean and Wallis said they’re concerned that the tally from the financial fallout due to Swanson’s termination is growing.

“It concerns me that we need to spend up to $120,000 on something that has been part of the previous two city managers’ roles,” Wean said. “It was a concern from the beginning of the appointment of the interim manager and whether he had capacity,  and I was told he was comfortable with budgeting.”

“I was surprised to see this on the agenda,” Wallis said.  "We are short-staffed. But we weren’t short staffed before,” she said, a reference to rash of senior staff resignations that have followed Swanson’s ouster.  

“Now we are in a bind (after receiving)  assurances that he (Duscha) would be able to handle these responsibilities,” Wallis concluded.

Councilman Erik Halvorson said the city should have hired a finance director when Sacha became city manager six years ago. “We need someone to focus on our finances,” he said.

Councilwoman Kalei LaFave,  an ally of Duscha, said just because the city needs budgeting help now does not mean he’s unskilled and that he and Collins have been occupied with other tasks since coming aboard.

Collins, who replaced Ann Rivers as assistant city manager after Rivers resigned in May, has a background in public works, not finance.

Assembling a budget for a city of Longview’s size is a highly complex, computerized effort that takes into account minute detail — such as the salaries and benefits of every worker — as well as a fair amount of prognosticating about inflation, the strength of economy (and thus tax revenues ) and council and public support for tax increases, Sacha told me Thursday. The process typically starts in April to make sure it is complete by December.

The council vote Tuesday night split the usual allegiances on controversial matters. LaFave and Halvorson joined council members Keith Young and Ruth Kendall in support of hiring Exigy. Kendall, who usually votes with the minority, said the consultant is urgently needed to get a budget written on time. 

Mayor Spencer Boudreau, who usually votes with the majority,  joined Wean and Wallis in opposition, saying he’d prefer to put the money toward hiring a permanent finance director. 

Exigy is owned by Jeff Swanson, who was Battle Ground’s city manager in 2016-18. In a touch of irony, Kris Swanson was made permanent city manager there Wednesday. They are unrelated.

Assuming Exigy bills Longview for its entire contracted amount,  that would bring the known projected tally related to Swanson’s pointless and unfair firing to at least $500,000. That’s enough to hire four police officers for a year.

That number includes the severance packages paid to former city attorney Dana Gigler and Assistant City Manager Ann Rivers, which cost the city a combined $150,000 to $200,000. I’m still awaiting final figures from the city. Gigler and Rivers both came under the attack of the new council majority.

These expenses are likely just the tip of the iceberg, and the final tally may never be quantifiable. Future costs will include:

• The cost of whatever settlement the city and its insurance pool eventually pay Swanson, who is pursuing gender discrimination and breach of contract claims.

• In addition, Swanson is expecting at least $100,500 in six-months’ severance pay. She has not received it yet because she is unwilling to sign a release of claims. She also has been paid $28,545 in vacation time and received wages and benefits from March 14 to April 22 while she was technically “suspended.” That amount was unavailable but would have been about $20,000 based on her annual pay level.

• The eventual cost of defending the four majority city council members — Kalei LaFave, Erik Halvorson, Keith Young and Spencer Boudreau — who have been sued for alleged breaches of the state Open Meetings Act in how they handled Swanson’s  termination and Duscha’s subsequent hiring.

• The eventual annual cost of hiring a full-time city finance director, which likely will approach $150,000 or more, counting benefits. 

• Higher costs for public works because of delays in selling $10 million worth of bonds to pay for projects such as improving Columbia Heights Road, paving 38th Avenue and Glenwood Drive. The city can’t get insurance for the  bonds — which are like taking out a long-term loan — because of the lawsuits against the city, Collins said.  Construction costs are rising fast. For example, costs for irrigation systems — needed at the city-owned Mint Valley Golf Course — are rising 10% to 15% annually, the council learned Tuesday.

The city’s two-year operating fund budget totaled $95 million for 2023-24. Total spending, including for the construction, utility and other budgets, is about $200 million.

The costs of the chaos caused by Swanson’s ouster may not be much in comparison to the city’s total expenditures. But the city is projecting a budget deficit of several million dollars in the next two-year budget cycle.

And the council is asking voters this fall to approve a 0.1% hike in the sales tax — a penny on a $10 purchase — to raise $900,000 annually to hire more police. Will the council’s waste of money, time and energy — which it was copiously warned about — undercut support for the levy?

Without making a decision Tuesday, council members grappled with how to use $3 million in remaining COVID relief money: Use it to help balance the next budget? Help finance a major reservoir replenishment line to improve safety, taste and service? Or replace the 48-year-old MintValley irrigation system, which has given up the ghost and will cost $5.8 million to replace (the city has a $2 million grant to offset part of the cost)?

Difficult choices, made even more difficult by the consequences of the council’s reckless decisions.