WESTOVER — Municipality leaders and county commissioners are coming together to find ways to work on problems together.
At this week’s Westover City Council meeting, Morgantown Mayor Bill Kawecki and Monongalia County Commissioner Sean Sikora presented an idea to bring municipality leaders and county officials together with a mediator to target specific problems with creative solutions.
Westover Mayor David Johnson said he thought Westover would be interested in learning more.
Kawecki said the quarterly Mon commission meetings were inspiration for an idea to continue the conversation beyond an hour discussion. He said those meetings are held quarterly for an hour, allowing various entities to “come up with solutions to some of our problems.”
“As we were talking, we were thinking that the idea of having the conversation is a good thing. We want to continue that. The question is how should we go about this? And, how do we really bring to light the things that we want to talk about?”
Sikora said visiting the different city councils had given him some perspective on the different challenges different entities face.
He explained they are just in the idea phase.
“The thought process is that we pick a day and get us all away from our phones, away from our offices, bring in a facilitator to maybe go out and interview each of us, each of the entities beforehand to kind of get what your problems are,” he said. “Then, compile them and get in a room and talk about it. Have a rules of engagement where we are respectable and we treat each other as equals, which we are. Then, we can see what we can do to work through some larger issues or help each other learn what our challenges are.”
Kawecki said the idea of a facilitator had been useful for the Morgantown City Council, upon having five new members of council and many different ideas.
“So, each of us came in with our own particular perspective, each of us representing our own particular contingency that had some good ideas and things they wanted us to bring forward,” he said.
“We had 72 different approaches to things we were trying to go after.”
“Our city manager would just be absolutely crazy trying to satisfy all of us. We brought in a facilitator. … We were able to narrow that down to a point where we are starting to make progress on quite a few things that we all finally came to agreement on.”
Kawecki said another goal is for the municipalities to be proactive rather than reactive.
“We are, as municipalities, beset by people who have good intentions and want to tell us what we should be doing, and we respond, or they go ahead and do what they are going to do sometimes. We deal with the consequences,” he said.
“It would be nice for us to get off the ground and determine to these people, who are well-intentioned, what we would like to have them help us accomplish. And, we do it collectively.”
Kawecki said they are trying to determine which municipalities are interested in participating.
“We don’t have anything firm in mind at the moment, other than if you are willing to participate in this kind of activity, we are willing to try to put it together and bring back a presentation for you,” he said.
Johnson said he didn’t put the presentation on Westover’s agenda this week so council could think about the suggestion.
“I wanted council to hear what you had to say and give them time to think about it because when we have it on the agenda, then we have to act on that,” he said.
Johnson suggested the time could be used at the intergovernmental meetings for this type of discussion. Those are meetings already held every few months with leaders of different municipalities.
Johnson wondered if other councilors could attend those meetings.
Westover Councilmember Janice Goodwin said the meeting may be useful for deciding how to accomplish this idea.
“Maybe we can dedicate that meeting to the facilitator and the presentation of trying to funnel it to a workable workload, and maybe that could be the focus for that, and then move on from there,” she said.
Sikora said he thought a separate meeting would be better.
“We really need to get away from the situation where we have a quorum trying to come to decisions. What we really need to do is provoke a discussion, and from there go on and create programs that you might then approach,” Kawecki said.
Westover councilmember Ralph Mullins said he was interested.
“I can’t speak for the rest of council, but what you guys are saying, I’m all for it,” he said. “Communication, like you’re saying, is at the basis of solving problems. If we can come to a mutual understanding on mutual issues, and it would benefit both of us to work together, why wouldn’t we?”
Kawecki said they would be attending Granville and Star City council meetings.
