Rhodes Less Traveled

The Port of Bremerton burnished its well-deserved reputation as the most tone-deaf public agency in Kitsap County this week by wasting $80,000 of the taxpayers’ money to hire a full-time employee whose main responsibility will apparently be to assure the public its tax money isn’t being wasted.

Commissioner Bill Mahan, whose disconnect with reality appears to grow wider by the day, was the most vocal advocate for hiring a marketing/communications director — at an annual salary of $65,000 plus $15,000 in benefits.

“I feel this position is crucial to the effectiveness of the port and for letting people know what the port is doing,” he said. “I don’t want to tell the public, ‘We wanted to be more transparent, but we didn’t want to put more money toward it.’”

Which prompts two responses.

First, there already exists a vehicle for telling the public what the port is up to. It’s called the media.

Port Orchard Independent reporter Justine Frederiksen attends virtually every Port of Bremerton meeting and her subsequent stories are shared among all five Sound Publishing newspapers in Kitsap County. The Kitsap Sun also routinely covers port commissioner meetings and, like us, finds no end of newsworthy material in their antics.

So what exactly is Mahan’s point? That the stories currently appearing in all of our newspapers are inaccurate simply because they report the news rather than spouting the approved party line?

If so, precisely how does the port’s newly hired, handsomely compensated marketing/communications person plan to change what’s being written?

Do Mahan and Port CEO Cary Bozeman, who also pushed hard for the new position, expect to go over our heads directly to the public via the port’s Web site and that people will take at face value what their flack reports?

Good luck with that.

Even more fundamentally, while I wholeheartedly agree that the port suffers from a serious credibility gap, it isn’t because the public doesn’t know what the commissioners are doing.

It’s because it does.

The voters, as Commissioner Mahan will discover in November should he be brazen enough to seek re-election, are still seething over the board’s decision in 2006 to raise local property taxes in order to fund massive upgrades to the Bremerton Marina.

No, it didn’t help that the decision was deliberately made with little or no public input, but it isn’t as though the voters would have been any happier had the commissioners approved the increase in the light of day.

If the Port of Bremerton wants to rehabilitate its tarnished image with the public, “transparency” is only a small part of the problem. The real issue is substance, not style.

Rather than worrying about whether its expensive, irresponsible decisions were made out in the open or behind closed doors, how about simply not making expensive, irresponsible decisions?

Instead of hiring a shill to rationalize the money they’re wasting, wouldn’t it make a little more sense to simply stop wasting the money in the first place?

The port doesn’t need a full-time employee to tell its story.

What it desperately needs is a better story to tell.