Baker City Mayor gives update on what the City Council is working on

BAKER CITY – (Information from Baker City Mayor Kerry McQuisten) Baker City Mayor Kerry McQuisten has recently been updating the City of Baker City’s Facebook page about what is going on with the new Baker City Council.  Yesterday McQuiesten posted another update, that post in its entirety is as follows: 

“Hi, All. Last night City Council held our work session to discuss the Blacks’ “Common Sense Sanctuary City” idea and all the feedback that came from public testimony. City Attorney Dan Van Thiel and District Attorney Greg Baxter attended, and I would like to thank them both for their support and advice. It helped!

I was proud of our Council. We don’t typically agree on all subjects, but all seven of us would like the community to know how much we value our local businesses, and take action that shows it. We are in agreement that the Governor’s ongoing COVID mandates are harming our community, not helping. We want to find a way stand by and stand up for our businesses without causing them further harm.

I will say up front that despite some of the comments I’ve seen, a mayor and a city council do not have the legal ability to override state law, short of organizing a full-on uprising, and there hasn’t been a mayor in Oregon who has. However, many of us are pushing back hard for their cities at this point. What this means, as advised by our attorney, is that if we simply declared our City “open,” we would still have no ability to protect our small businesses from weaponized State agencies. We don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking we would. With that in mind, we came up with a number of items to pursue. Votes don’t happen at work sessions, but as drafts are completed or as related legislation comes up, we will move that item to the agenda of the next regular meeting for a vote, starting with the March 9th meeting.

First, we’re drafting a letter to Governor Brown requesting to be in the low-population-county category rather than in the middle where we’ve been placed. That middle population category doesn’t fit us. Also, with the Governor’s focus on helping what she considers disadvantaged populations, why isn’t our rural county’s economy being specially considered in this light? Councilor Spriet will submit some wording to City Manager Cannon and City Recorder Lafavor for review and formatting. Once this letter is in good shape, we’ll vote on it.

Next, I’ll be working with some wording of proclamations and resolutions following that same procedure. We’ll draft a proclamation summarizing our support and sentiments. We’re also drafting resolutions declaring a mental health, small business economic, and crime state of emergency due specifically to Governor Brown’s response to COVID. Councilors Dixon and Waggoner in particular spoke to the effects of these mandates on local suicides, depression, and domestic abuse. It is our hope that other cities and counties will pick up this unique stance, enact similar resolutions of their own, and that we can create enough of a snowball effect that Salem will have to hear us.

Finally, we can support pending legislation that would require reparations to businesses that lost money due to this year’s emergency declarations, and any future statewide ballot initiative that would limit the Governor’s emergency powers going forward. Recordings of work sessions are found under “Council Videos” on the City’s web site.

We have a full regular meeting tonight (the 23rd), and I’ll try to get something written up about it in next week’s message. The packet and attachment for this next meeting totaled 573 pages of review! There has to be a record in that somewhere.

Thanks so much for reading.

Kerry McQuisten

Mayor of Baker City”

---

---

---

---

Elkhorn Media Group