MORGANTOWN — Morgantown Mayor Bill Kawecki and Monongalia County Commissioner Sean Sikora took turns attending one another’s meetings over the last couple days as they look to spearhead an initiative to increase local government communication.
Sikora addressed Morgantown City Council on Tuesday before welcoming Kawecki to speak at Wednesday’s regular commission meeting.
Both Sikora and Kawecki have said they would like to see the representatives of the county and all the municipalities come together with a facilitator, come up with a list of mutual priorities and get to work.
Kawecki said he envisions a much more involved process that will cover more ground than the hour-long, bi-monthly leadership forums spearheaded by the county starting in 2014.
He went on to say that city council appears to be in support of the proposal. Likewise, commissioners Tom Bloom and Ed Hawkins both said they back the idea.
“Traffic, roads, pedestrian issues, drug issues, you name it, we have it,” Kawecki said. “What we don’t have is a communication that allows us to understand each other’s perspective … Let’s set our priorities, throw them on the table and see what we can cooperate on. Then we can prioritize those in a manner that we can attack them and make them better.”
The mayor said the city implemented a similar process recently by bringing in a facilitator to help pare down council’s strategic goals.
Sikora said he’s tried to meet with local officials regularly since taking office, but there’s little that can be accomplished when one of three commissioners is speaking to one of seven council members.
He went on to say that there is also a tendency to get caught up on the issues the various entities may disagree on as opposed to the issues they could tackle as a unified force.
“At the root of every problem, if you drill down far enough, you’re going to find there was some breakdown in communication that contributed to the problem,” Sikora said.
The commission gave Sikora the green light to begin working with Kawecki to present the idea in Westover, Granville and Star City and start some preliminary planning.
