Last week, officials in the Willamette Valley city of Independence closed its parks and the museum and threatened to close the library, although state law forestalls that action. A $30,000 grant from the nonprofit Friends of the Community Parks has allowed two city parks to remain open through the end of the year.
The closures come after voters shot down an operations levy in November 2024. In June, the city council passed fees totaling a net increase of $12.65 a month per household to pay for city parks, a museum and the library. The city says it has no choice but to suspend its services after a referendum to reverse fees on residents qualified for the November ballot.
Greg Ellis, the former city manager of Independence, led this referendum effort, and he joins us to discuss the closure of city services. Also joining us is Kate Schwarzler, the mayor of Independence.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with a contentious fight over closed public parks in Independence outside of Salem. To understand what’s happening, we have to go back a little bit to 2024 when voters there shot down a levy that would have funded the library, parks and the museum. So the city council went back to the drawing board, and this past June, it passed new fees to pay for those services. That meant a net increase of about $13 a month per household. But a group of residents cried foul, and they successfully pushed for a referendum. The fee increase will be on the upcoming November ballot.
That brings us to last week when city officials said that with the fee revenue on hold, they had no choice but to close their parks, prompting outrage from a lot of residents. In a few minutes, we will talk to the Independence mayor. But first, I’m joined by Greg Ellis. He is a former city manager for Independence, and he helped lead the referendum effort. Greg Ellis, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Greg Ellis: Thank you.
Miller: Why did you push for this referendum?
Ellis: Well, as you pointed out in 2024, the voters, the citizens of Independence voted that referendum down, or that fee down, by a margin of 60% to 40%. And it was a local option levy that would have been a five-year local option levy. But then fast forward to this budget, and the city council said, well, we have no option but to put the fee out there to maintain these services. I felt they had already said no, the citizens, so I felt that the citizens should have the right to vote on this again. And let’s go out and sell it. Let’s sell it to the citizens. If you want the library, parks and museums, let’s vote yes on that referendum.
I was the chief petitioner, and I went out and got 900 and some signatures – 771, I think, were validated. So it’s going to be on the November ballot. So strictly the reason I did it was to give the citizens an opportunity to say yes or no. And I didn’t advocate for yes or no when I was getting those signatures. I said you have the opportunity.
Miller: What about now? So you have successfully put this referendum on the ballot. Can you share how you plan to vote yes or no?
Ellis: I’m probably going to vote no. And…
Miller: Sorry, just to be clear, meaning no on the fee increase or no to reject the rejection?
Ellis: Well, the “yes” vote keeps the ordinance and the fee in place. The “no” vote takes away the fee.
Miller: So why do you plan to be a “no” vote on the fee increase?
Ellis: The city council, when you talk about what happened in the past, they keep saying we had a bunch of meetings, we went through Budget Committee, we went through an ad hoc committee to see what the options might be, and they came up with the fee. But in my opinion, after having 25 years of service as a city manager in the state, I think there were other options that they are not looking at. And if you look, some of the options are fee transfers and/or interfund loans. And there are a lot of cities that do that. But for some reason, the city of Independence says, we can’t do that. That’s not an option. Instead, they’re closing the parks and, right now, having meetings to close the library.
So, I’m saying that is not necessary. And they’re saying we’ve had hundreds of meetings and it is, but the only option they’ve looked at is the fee … Well, that’s not true, I shouldn’t say that. They say they’ve looked at several options, but two of those options they did not look at were interfund loans and interfund transfers. And you only have to go as far as Monmouth, which is our neighboring city, our sister city. They’ve got an interfund transfer loan. If you look on page 144 of their budget, they call it general fund support services, and those are taken out of sanitary, water, stormwater, power, light and street.
If you go back as far as just last Tuesday, there was an issue with the Parks SDC fund in Monmouth, and I don’t know how it got there, but it was overdrawn by $250,000 to $260,000. And the finance director did a very good job, I think, of explaining why, and she did a very good job of giving different options on how to fix that. The thing they went to, the city of Monmouth right next door to us, they went to interfund loan from the transportation or street fund to the Parks SDC fund…
Miller: Let me run a quote by you from the mayor of Independence, who we will talk to in just a few minutes, but I want to give you a chance to respond to this. This was on her blog recently: “Some of the same voices associated with past city management now present themselves as the experienced people who can rescue Independence. Experience deserves scrutiny. Anyone claiming to have the answer should be willing to explain the financial practices used during their own leadership, why structural problems were allowed to continue, and whether their proposed solution simply returns independence to borrowing from one fund to support another.” What’s your response?
Ellis: Yeah, the borrowing from one fund to support another, as I just explained, is very common in this state. And if you go back to now they’re coming forward, well, I got a letter from David Clyne and myself probably a year ago. It’s like, hey, we’ve got 65 years of experience between us. Let us come in and talk to you, you know? I mean, that sounds like we know all there is to know, but no, we don’t. We just think that, hey, maybe two heads is better than one or three heads is better than one.
So the offer was there, and it was rejected. I didn’t hear it back. I mean, Kate was nice enough to actually say thank you for your letter, at least on one of the letters I wrote. But other than that, there was no opportunity to go in and talk to…
Miller: The basic argument that I’ve seen against what you’re talking about is that it doesn’t pay enough attention to what city leaders have called a structural problem, that overall there’s not enough money to go around, and if you take money from one fund, it means it’s not gonna go to other essential services. And they’ve already made a lot of cuts, and therefore, they can’t pay for parks, the library and the museum simply by taking money from other existing funds. Where is your disagreement to that basic assertion that you’re not acknowledging a structural problem?
Ellis: No, there is. I agree. And I’ve written in a letter – I’m quoting myself – you can’t read a staff report from Kenna West without hearing a structural imbalance. That is actually a defined term. You can look it up in dictionaries. The structural imbalances in terms of finance, especially in cities, is where revenue does not keep up with recurring funds.
The word “recurring” is the real key there, because if you look at what’s happening in this budget, they say they need a city attorney. That city attorney, the first step is $110,000. I don’t know what they’re starting them at, but they’ve got that city attorney on staff now. It’s $110,000. You’ve got 50% carrying costs on that with PERS, with health and whatever else there is. So you’re talking $160,000 of new money. If you go back to before Kenna was here, this is budgeted, audited, and audited numbers, not just budget. The three years running before she got here was $33,000, $34,000, $33,000, in that range. And then she comes on and she’s an attorney, and all of a sudden the costs go up to $81,000. The next year $66,000, and those are audited numbers. And then budgeted last year was $60,000. This year, even with an attorney on staff, they’ve budgeted $51,500.
Miller: So just to summarize your point here as I understand it, because I think I and a lot of listeners may not be totally familiar with all the details of the Independence budget or staff, but you’re saying you see excess money being spent, in this case, on legal services, so there’s fat to be cut in the city budget. Is that your overall point?
Ellis: That is correct.
Miller: Greg Ellis, just briefly, I’m curious … As I’ve been prepping for this conversation, I couldn’t help but think about the two recent conversations that we had on this show about North Plains, where this initial incendiary debate about urban growth, their urban growth boundary, and what the city could or should be in the future there has morphed into so much mistrust and turmoil that there are now huge questions about the city’s ability to function and govern, [and] tons of turnover.
As I was reading about what’s happening now in Independence, I was just wondering how worried you are about a kind of snowballing of mistrust and how you think about preventing that? Separate from the minutia that we’ve talked about, and I’ll get into, with the mayor about budgeting, or parks, or libraries, I guess I’m curious more about the civic soul of a place?
Ellis: Well, that’s a good question. And I’ve got to give actually, the city of Independence mayor, whoever is involved in it, some kudos for their communication. And I think they are trying to get out there. I don’t necessarily agree with some of the stuff that they say in the videos, in their communication. I think it’s misleading, some of it, but that’s OK. At least they’re putting stuff out there. And I think that is the key. You have to make sure that you are communicating with your citizens. When I was city manager, that was a strong point for me. I was a gadfly. I was everywhere in town.
So, I think what you have to do is have communications. I used to go to what they call the OFC Club and have coffee. And that is the Old Farts Club. The guys that are retired, sit around a coffee shop and yell at each other. [Laughter] Sorry if I said something wrong, but…
Miller: [Laughs] No, and pretend to solve the world’s problems as people who are not doing it.
Ellis: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it can be. I used to go, and literally, I’d get in pretty heated debates with people. And I found out later, one of the guys came, he says, “you can’t believe how much they appreciate you coming in there, yelling at them and then letting them yell at you.” That’s part of the job. But I don’t see that same thing with this community. I mean, the mayor gets out there. I don’t see – and I may be wrong – except for the videos on the website, I don’t see the city manager engaging as much with the community as I used to. Maybe she does. I don’t see it.
Miller: Greg Ellis, thank you very much for your time. I do want to go to the mayor now, but Greg Ellis, thanks very much.
Ellis: Thank you.
Miller: Greg Ellis is a former city manager of Independence.
Kate Schwarzler joins us now. She is the mayor of the city. Mayor Kate, great to have you on the show.
Kate Schwarzler: Thank you, Dave. It’s great to be here and be part of the conversation.
Miller: Can you first just remind us what’s actually closed right now and what’s not, because there are state laws and some private funding that have complicated the original picture.
Schwarzler: Yes, so, unfortunately, when the referendum was put into place, we had to stop expenditures towards those things because again, we didn’t have that revenue that was part of that adopted budget. So, when those signatures got verified, it did close our museum, so that is no longer open to the public, and it did close our parks. And then libraries – it is a more complicated process. We have to go through a public hearing process. We’ve had the first public hearing. And the second public hearing is scheduled November 10, I believe. So there is a different process to close down the library, which we are then having to preserve funding to make sure that we can keep that library open for the required amount of time.
Miller: I want to turn to one of the most incendiary allegations that has been circulating, and one place where this has come up is from an anonymous poster on the city’s Facebook page. It’s this line: “Closing the parks and things seems like a manipulation strategy by the city.” The allegation, as I understand it, is that you closed parks not because you had to, but to force residents to vote to approve the fee increase. What’s your response?
Schwarzler: Yeah, I think the anger and disappointment from our community is certainly very understandable. I think, for some people, this felt very sudden, but this is not a publicity stunt. This is not something, frankly, that staff or council wanted to see happen. We had a solution in place. But when that funding is removed, when that referendum came through, we had to do the responsible thing by no longer expending money towards that, towards keeping them open.
Miller: What else did you consider when this source of revenue went away instead of these closures?
Schwarzler: Yeah, we hear that quite a bit. And again, I think for your average resident who is busy living their life, going to work and raising kids, they don’t always have the opportunity to pay close attention to some of what’s happening at the city and it did feel very sudden to them. But we have been discussing these structural deficits for several years now, and we’ve been making changes. We have eliminated or not filled 11 positions over the last several years. We have been reducing the level of service in our library and other places. And we have been combining efforts where possible to try to minimize this and to try to extend the amount of time that we had to put a longer-term solution in place.
Miller: Am I right that everything you’ve just described though, that happened in the lead up to the passage of this fee increase? I’m curious, once the referendum was approved for the November ballot, what options did you see that you had as a city besides closing parks?
Schwarzler: Closing the parks and museum, and starting that library process is because we don’t feel like we have other options available to us. And again, I think people need to keep in mind, or it’s helpful to keep in mind, that we’re in a time frame crunch. Some of the things that we want to keep studying to look for longer-term solutions don’t allow us to have time on our side. So we had to do something pretty immediate. We don’t have the reserves to draw down. The reserves have already been spent, and that’s where we feel like we were backed into a corner in terms of, do we have a savings account per se?
I know that Greg Ellis likes to say that we have these enterprise funds available to us, but when you think about it, our total fund balance that we have as a city, we’re not the same as a household budget where everything is available in one checking account. So, the money that we have held in water, sewer, transportation, debt service, grants and other areas, those are restricted funds and they can’t necessarily be used to cover these general fund services. And that’s what got us in this situation in the first place, is a continued history of making these loans and transfers, to the point now that if we did want to try to transfer from one of those enterprise funds, we’re frankly probably not able to. Because we also have to maintain a fund balance there to basically act as collateral against some of the prior loans and transfers that we’re, frankly, still paying off.
Miller: What about the other point that Greg Ellis mentioned? I got a little bit lost in some of the first names and some of the numbers, but as I understood it, the implication is that you’re spending, as a city, more than you need to on legal services, and it seemed like he was saying that there might be other places where you can tighten your budget. What’s your response?
Schwarzler: Yeah, I think that’s a fair question for people to ask: Have we taken a look at personnel costs? Because those are one of the more expensive things that we have across our budget. The legal has come up frequently because the timing of it was not … unfortunately, the optics of it, with the timing. In our budget, we did approve bringing on legal counsel. We made a data-informed decision. So we’ve been tracking this for a while. We’ve been tracking how much we spend in legal fees, and then what we would be able to get if we brought that in-house.
So we were finally at that tipping point where we were spending as much in legal fees as we would be spending if we brought someone in-house. And by bringing someone in-house, we now have them for the full amount of time, if that makes sense, instead of just for some contracted hours. So, we have more flexibility of being able to go to this person and ask some questions. We now have legal counsel available at our council meetings, which is, frankly, really helpful. So, we’re getting more efficiency for that same amount of money. And I think people like to look at it that you added this expense, and frankly, that expense has always been there. We are now able to get more hours for that same amount of money, and I think that’s a really important distinction.
Miller: You know, reading through a number of your recent blog posts, they were all very respectful. But I sensed a kind of underlying frustration – for lack of a better word – specifically in response to the charge that this blindsided people or came as a surprise to a lot of people. What I read, maybe between the lines but in some places increasingly explicitly, was, hey folks, we’ve been talking about this for months and for years. I know you’re busy, but just because you didn’t pay attention doesn’t mean we didn’t have these conversations and that they weren’t public and recorded.
But I’m curious where this leaves you now as a city leader [and] how you think about transparency, about public input when there’s only so much you can do? You can’t have the entire city be present in a meeting or watch a Zoom thing. But I guess I’m just wondering how you think about this question of public understanding now.
Schwarzler: Yeah, that’s a really great question, and you touched on it a little bit before in the issue of trust. And unfortunately, I think this community has dealt with a history of having a trust deficit in terms of how decisions were made, how those were communicated. So it’s something that we will, frankly, just continue to have to show up for.
The things that we have done to help overcome that, we have an amazing communications director who has done a lot to strengthen the reach of our community. And thinking about how communities operate today is very different than how they did 10, 20 years ago in terms of how people get information. Newspapers, unfortunately, are not as common or they’re online now. So, we have a very active social media presence. We are on YouTube. We have a comprehensive website. We send out, more than once a month, a newsletter that we want our residents to read. We have office hours, we have town halls. So, we are trying to get out there as much as we can, because I think from the council standpoint, we realize how important this information is and what an impact it has on people.
If there’s an upside to this, I think there is a silver lining, people are paying attention more and we are hoping that they will be more engaged. And I agree that not everybody can come down to a city council meeting. We record them, they’re online. We’ve also started doing a 60-second council recap, so people can at least watch just a quick one-minute video, and if there’s something that catches their eye, they can go in and then watch more of that. So it’s something that we will need to continue working on. It’s important to us, it’s important to have input, because at the end of the day, this does represent the community and that’s why we’re here.
Miller: Mayor Schwarzler, thanks very much.
Schwarzler: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Miller: Kate Schwarzler is the mayor of Independence.
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