Bogart to resign Sept. 23

Baker City Manager Steve Bogart will resign Sept. 23, less than 10 months after the City Council hired him.

Bogart said his decision came about because the city’s budget committee and the City Council largely ignored his proposed budget and made changes that ultimately resulted in four employees losing their jobs or employment contracts.

The new budget takes effect with the start of the fiscal year on Thursday.

“I am not comfortable with the adopted budget and don’t feel that I can do the job that you feel needs done,” Bogart wrote in a letter of resignation he submitted to the City Council on Friday.

“Though I recognize the real financial challenges that confront the City of Baker City, I am not as anxious about the city’s financial future as its functional one,” Bogart wrote.

Bogart said he made his resignation effective Sept. 23 to give the city time to find his replacement.

Mayor Dennis Dorrah said Bogart’s resignation didn’t come as a surprise, because Bogart informed the Council of his intention to quit a couple weeks ago, during the budgeting process.

He said the Council could reconsider some of the budget decisions that prompted Bogart’s resignation, but “I haven’t heard any clamoring for that.”

When the Council meets July 13, Dorrah said he hopes to engage his six fellow councilors in a discussion of ways the recruitment process for a city manager might be improved.

He said the process used in the past, in which councilors had to work their way through several dozen applications from people they didn’t know, and then select a finalist from that group, was a costly and time-consuming process that he didn’t much like.

“I had the thought that we could give Tim Johnson a call, and see where he is at,” Dorrah said.

The Council offered Johnson, of Portland, the city manager job in December 2009, but he decided not to take the job because he was helping his mother, who was ill.

The Council then offered the job to Bogart, who had served as the city’s interim manager in 2004-05, when Jerry Gillham was serving with the National Guard in Iraq.

The opening in 2009 came about after the Council fired Steve Brocato on June 9 of that year.

Tim Collins, a retired longtime city employee, served as interim manager after Brocato’s dismissal.

“We have come full circle. A year and a week ago we were without a city manager and we are going to be without a city manager again,” said Councilor Milo Pope.

Pope, one of three councilors who voted against the motion to fire Brocato, has remained a vocal critic of that decision and its aftermath.

“They fired Brocato, they pushed Tim Collins out, then they were going to hire Tim Johnson despite the advice to vet him, then they hired Steve Bogart and they made life impossible for Steve,” Pope said.

“They really blew it when the fired Steve Brocato,” Pope said. “We have really wasted this past year. The recall I was involved in was also a waste of time, but it was well intended. Now what. It’s going to cost us more money to hire another city manager.”

The recall Pope mentioned was an effort to remove from office Dorrah and Councilor Beverly Calder, both of whom voted to fire Brocato.

Voters rejected the recall by a margin of more than 2-to-1.

Bogart said that what bothered him most about the recent budget process was that it made increasing the city’s cash reserves a higher priority than retaining city employees.

“I can’t think of any more appropriate reason for my resignation than it was a philosophical difference with the Council,” Bogart said. “Tomorrow is the last day for Don Chance (city planning director), Shirley Manions (janitorial), and Gene Stackle (economic development manager), and July 7 is Jennifer Watkins’ last day,” Bogart said.

Watkins held the combined position of assistant city manager and director of the community and economic development department, which was a department eliminated under budget revisions imposed by the City Council.

“Jennifer Watkins was with the city over 12 years. Her handprint is all over the community development done over the last 12 years, and possibly even more,” Bogart said.

He said the Council’s decision to eliminate the community and economic development department and the jobs held by Watkins and Stackle caught him by surprise.

Before he was directed to cut that department to bolster the reserve fund, Bogart said he hadn’t heard any concerns, or very few, from Council members about the effectiveness of the economic development staff.

“I didn’t have two or three Council members coming to me saying the economic development staff was not doing much, or anything like that,” Bogart said.

Bogart said the City Council put together a list of priorities in March, and he developed a budget that incorporated as much of those priorities as he could. However, he said changes to that budget made by the budget committee and later by the City Council weren’t consistent with those priorities.

“It was a change in policy, a change in the goals,” Bogart said. “I can’t lead if I don’t know what direction we are going, or what the priorities are.”