Time to think outside the city

A few years after Rod Hartman had retired as the 10-year mayor of Coulee Dam in 1996, he tried to impress upon me the absolute necessity of merging the local towns.

I agreed, and always have, that it would probably make sense to do so, even if it would be complicated. But having found too many die-hard old-timers too entrenched in old arguments during the last round of discussions on consolidation, I told him I didn’t think it was time to try it again.

Now it is.

Hartman knew, from decades of working with city budgets and local, region-wide civic needs, that the world had moved beyond the small town. State laws had evolved to reflect legal realities that were getting harder to navigate for five volunteer council members, a part-time volunteer mayor and a small staff. And this community does that with literally four times the effort.

At the time he was mayor, Coulee Dam’s finances were certainly the best among the four local municipalities’. That didn’t matter much to Rod; the benefits of joining into one town would far outway anything Coulee Dam citizens might give up in terms of taking on some portion of another town’s debt, the possible effect of a merger.

Hartman was looking beyond the borders of the town he’d served as mayor and councilmember; he was looking at how the whole community would best be served.

Hartman died seven years ago this month, but let us hope that his attitude — of wanting to move the area forward together — still lives on to some extent in local leadership.

Let’s hope we can all look beyond our closest borders toward the goal of progress for a small city.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher