PORT ANGELES – A grassroots group frustrated with the direction of the city of Port Angeles, is recruiting candidates to run for city council.
The Committee for Common-Sense City Council has been active with a Facebook page (lhttps://www.facebook.com/PAcitizens) with the goal to get the community active in an election this fall that has the majority of seats on the council up for election.
Retired probation officer, lifelong Port Angeles resident and civic activist Danetta Rutten is part of the effort. She says the current city council is too vested in national and world affairs and not enough local issues.
“We’ve just kind of lost accountability for a whole lot of things that are going on in our city right now and citizens are afraid. The infrastructure, we can’t take our kids to parks, we can’t go to Hollywood Beach. City council doesn’t seem to be take accountability for what’s not working and be creative enough to move forward. My mother used to have a saying that ‘you can’t save the world until you start taking care of what you got right at home.'”
Former Port Angeles Mayor Karen Rogers is also involved. She says a lot of fellow citizens are frustrated with increasing problems ranging from transients, increasing drug paraphernalia in public spaces and local infrastructure problems.
“Thousands of citizens, if you really look at some of the comments these days on Facebook, that are just very very concerned and frustrated about what our town is looking like and the direction it’s headed. You know, the focus sometimes is on national politics and not taking care of the homefront.”
In an interview this week on KONP’s “Todd Ortloff Show”, Rogers said the group is reaching out to people interested in running for one of the four seats up for election this fall. The group wants to help people learn what it takes to be citizen representative, how to campaign, and how be effective at policy matters if elected. So far, none of the four council members up for re-election have indicated to us if they will run.
Filing for city council and some other local offices on the ballot this fall starts May 17th.