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Things are looking up at Friendsview
First baby of the year in no rush
Toy-N-Joy effort nets second-highest
total ever
| Face
of council changes in one night |
Three new councilors
and Mayor Bob Stewart are sworn in during ceremonies Monday evening |
By Gary Allen, Newberg Graphic
News Editor
Email Gary at gallen@eaglenewspapers.com
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 Things moved quickly Monday evening at the Newberg City Council meeting.
By 7:10 p.m. Monday Newberg had a new mayor. By 7:20 p.m. three new council
members had been sworn in. By 7:30 the outgoing mayor and the former council president had
been recognized for their service.
Mayor Bob Stewart placed his left hand on the Bible and held his right hand
erect as he recited the oath of office. Many members of Stewart’s family, as well as
friends, broke into applause for the new mayor once City Manager Jim Bennett completed the
ceremony.
“I was very ... very honored that that many people were there to see me
sworn in,” Stewart said. “I was taken aback.”
Applause was de rigueur again when new council members Mike McBride, Bob
Andrews and Bob Larson received their oath of office. The three Bobs and McBride assumed
their seats at the council table next to senior councilors Robert Soppe, Doug Pugsley and
Roger Currier. It represented the first time in nearly two decades that the council was
entirely made up of men.
Before the council could get on with business, city staff took a few minutes
to recognize Stewart’s predecessor, Chuck Cox, and longtime councilor and council
president, Robert Weaver.
Following Bennett’s praises of Weaver’s eight years on the council,
the veteran councilor charged the body to rise above politics and carry on the important
work of running city government, setting policy and representing the voters. He added that
he was confident this council would meet the challenge.
“I just feel really good about each of you sitting up there,”
Weaver said from the speaker’s podium. “Each of you have talent in some way ...
I say to you, be a team, search for the talents that you have.”
Weaver also took the opportunity to recommend the council look to
Currier’s experience for guidance and suggested he be elected council president.
Bennett praised Cox as being “the architect, and I don’t think
that’s too strong of word, of a lot of the great projects that have happened in the
city.” He praised Cox’s devotion to construction of the Newberg-Dundee bypass,
to refurbishing Central School and Highway 99W, and to the other projects Cox took on
during his two terms as mayor and one term as a city councilor.
As the lengthy applause subsided, Cox, standing on crutches before the podium
due to a fishing accident, quipped: “If I’d realized what a good guy I was I
might not have quit.”
He said, however, that he couldn’t take credit for work done by many
people in city government and among Newberg’s citizenry. He wished the council well
and “God’s speed.”
The council and mayor began work with the agenda’s first order of
business, electing a new council president. Soppe proffered the idea of decreasing the
president’s term to four months (the city charter calls for a two-year term) in order
to more easily gauge his progress and abilities. Although the charter requires a president
be elected every two years, Bennett said he thought the charter would also allow a
president to elected more frequently, as well.
Stewart argued that, in general, the council president’s only duty is to
fill in when the mayor is absent. Barring that, he said, there would be no gauge of the
president’s abilities.
“So on what are you going to base whether he did a good job or
not?” Stewart said.
The council agreed with Soppe, though, that with so many new faces it could
prove valuable to have some flexibility in electing a council president. The council
elected to change the term to four months and Currier, Larson and Soppe were nominated for
the position. Larson earned three votes to Currier’s one and Soppe’s zero to
become council president.
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From Jan. 8,
2003, Newberg Graphic
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