Sinkings and sailings

Search for city manager finally starting; costs for Swanson firing start to mount; vandalism at library rose garden; state too slow to restore volcano access

Council agrees on plan to search for new city manager

The Longview City Council has finally decided to do the right thing and launch a national search for a permanent city manager.

On a 5-1 vote, the council directed city staff to contact four search and recruitment firms, three of them from Washington and one from Florida. The council will select one at its meeting on Sept. 26.

The search will look for a replacement for Kris Swanson, whom the council’s majority bloc fired on a 4-3 vote on March 13 in one of its most controversial decisions in years. Retired Longview Police Chief Jim Duscha has been acting city manager since then.

The council had been wrangling over how to proceed, with Councilwoman Kalei LaFave wanting to give Duscha — her long-time ally — a chance to learn the job. She cast the lone vote on Tuesday without explaining why.

The council action emerged from a recommendation by a subcommittee of councilors Ruth Kendall, Keith Young and Erik Halvorson. (Young had to leave Tuesday’s meeting before the vote. but he supported the recommendation.)

In addition to recommending the search firms, the committee also called for incentives for candidates who must relocate to take the job. It also called for extensive public involvement in the search process.

Doing an extensive search for a new manager will promote healing on the council and give public credibility to the new manager. The fact that the majority of the council moved forward on this is a further sign of improving relations.

Kendall said the four consulting firms all have experience assisting with city manager searches in Washington. The three Washington consulting firms are GMP Consultants of Snoqualmie, Prothman of Issaquah and Karass Consulting of Olympia. The Florida firm is Colin Baenziger & Associates of Daytona Beach Shores.

“What attracted us to (Baenziger) is that they have done a lot of city manager placements in Washington state,” Kendall said.

Costs of Swanson firing start to mount

The city of Longview has paid out nearly $180,00 in severance and benefit costs to former City Attorney Dana Gigler and former Assistant City Manager Ann Rivers.

These are among the first precise accountings of costs related to the city council’s firing of City Manager Kris Swanson. However, they are just the beginning of the financial fallout from the decision.

Gigler and Rivers resigned after the council booted Swanson “without cause.” The city paid them severances as part of their negotiations to leave.

The city reported to me Thursday that Gigler was paid $88,020.34 in severance, vacation and floating holiday pay cash out, plus $4,800 in benefits.

The city paid Rivers $80,958.94 in severance, vacation and floating holiday cash out,  plus $4,800 in benefits.

The total comes to $178,579.28.

Swanson’s supporters told the council that its action would cost a significant amount for lawsuits, staffing upheavals and claims.

Swanson alone is still owed a minimum of $100,500 and has filed claims for wrongful termination of her contact and sex discrimination.

Additional costs will be the hire of a $250-an-hour consultant to help write the 2025-2026 budget; the legal costs of defending the four city councilors from an Open Public Meetings Act lawsuit and any settlement that may arise from it; hiring a financial director (Swanson served that role); and delays in starting projects that were to be funded through bond sales, which have been halted as a result of the lawsuit.

To these you could arguably add the costs of hiring Duscha instead of tapping Rivers to act as interim until a permanent manager was found. Duscha is making $177,000 a year salary as interim, not counting benefits.

Conservatively, the fallout from the council’s action will easily exceed $500,000 and likely will be significantly more — all of it a result of an ill-advised decision.

I’ll keep you up to date as more details become available.

Thief strikes Longview Library Rose Garden

“As killing as the canker to the rose,” English poet John Milton wrote of the Irish Sea drowning of his friend Edward King in 1637.

Had the 17th-century writer been alive in Longview today, he might have deplored the thieft and vandalism afflicting the Longview Library’s Memorial Rose Garden.

Someone dug up and stole four rose bushes in early August. They were four different varieties. One of the them — a deep pink hybrid tea called Peter Frankenfeld — is no longer commercially available. It will have to be replaced by rooting it from cuttings from other plants.

Peter Frankenfeld was first introduced in the 1950s and was the favorite rose of Grant Hendrickson, the late Longview School Superintendent and certified rosarian who for years directed care of the garden.

Later last month, around the time of Squirrel Fest (held at the Civic Circle) someone cut the leaves off more than 20 bushes, denuding them. They will survive, but growth and blooming will be set back.

There are no suspects, but the thefts and vandalism have been reported to Longview police. Library patrons who witness suspicious activities should contact library staff.

The damage “was very disheartening because we have worked so hard get the garden back up to snuff. I don’t know why someone would dig roses out of a public rose garden,” said Mary Hoover, a consulting rosarian certified by the American Rose Society.

Hoover suspects that whoever striped the leaves off may have been well-intentioned and cut out leaves infected with black spot, a common fungal disease of roses. The leaves were cut off, not yanked, which would have damaged the canes. But whoever did it was overzealous and reduced the plants’ ability to capture sunlight, so essential to roses. And they left the infected leaves on the ground, from where fungal spores could continue spreading.

Hoover and her team of a half dozen other volunteers work in the garden on Wednesdays. The garden is supported by Friends of the Library, a volunteer group that holds book sales and other events to raise money for Library activities that the city does not pay for, such as a new bookmobile.

Anyone wanting to help support the garden or the library can donate through the Friends of the Library. Donations can be designated to purchase a rose in memory of a loved one. Please consider a donation (Yes, I’m a rose nut. And my wife is a Friends of the Library volunteer).

One looming expense: The sprinkler system needs to be replaced with a more modern and efficient way of irrigating. Roses need lots of water.

The memorial garden was established in 1965 and contains a wide selection of old and newer varieties in its nearly 50 beds. It will be 60 years old next year.

State needs to accelerate work to restore Johnston Ridge access

Why is there not more outcry about the state’s projection that it won’t reopen the highway to one of Southwest Washington’s premier tourist attractions until May 2027?

A massive slide sloshed down South Coldwater Creek and washed out a section of SR 504 (Spirit Lake Memorial Highway) and a bridge at mile post 49 on May 14, 2023. Since then, the washout has blocked access to the Johnson Ridge Observatory and its cross-valley views into the crater of Mount St. Helens.

The star on this state graphic shows the location of the slide and bridge washout that has prevented access to Johnston Ridge since May 2023. (WSDOT graphic)

Design work for a new bridge started last summer and is supposed to be finished next summer, with construction to follow in 2026, according to the Washington State Department of Transportation.

It’s hard to accept that it’s taking three years to design the span. We’re not talking about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge here. And it’s fair to point out that state took only about four years to build the final six-mile stretch of highway from Coldwater Lake to Johnston Ridge, a route over precariously steep terrain.

For sure, this bridge replacement project is complicated because of the instability of the volcanic landscape, but it seems like the engineers should be able to design this span by this year and shave a a year off WSDOT’s schedule.