Port Townsend Mayor David Faber and City Manager John Mauro sat down at the Point Hudson Pavilion to deliver their annual State of the City address on March 5.   

“Tonight, we will be talking through our successes and challenges for the year 2024 and what we are looking forward to during the year 2025,” Faber said. 

KPTZ broadcasted the first hour of the address. 

Mauro led the presentation, beginning with a list of ten of the city’s “major highlights” for 2024. 

“There are more than ten to choose from, thank goodness, but I want to give you a high-level overview across a lot of different portfolios because the city does a lot of different things,” he said. 

Mauro kicked off the highlight reel with the completion of the $6 million Discovery Road Project, the $79 million Capital Facilities Plan, emergency infrastructure repairs and a new quarterly insert in The Leader, which aims to inform residents of the city’s ongoing efforts. 

Another accomplishment for the city under Mauro’s leadership is completing the $43 million General Sewer Plan to address failing infrastructure over the next four years and the rollout of income-based discounts on water and sewer bills.

“The fifth thing I will speak to on this slide is the [comprehensive plan] which is ongoing, but I think it’s worth noting last year, we kicked that off, did engagement, collaboration, there were technical elements you can now see in drafted and written form,” Mauro said. “There were a number of grants, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, some that were competitive, some that were state given, that we rolled into that planning process that is ongoing, with significant milestones this past year.” 

Mauro went on to discuss the city’s success in putting the Transportation Benefit District funds to work and leveraging millions in state grants for road improvements, the newly formed community services department, a new employee engagement program for city staff, and awards won, including one for a video on the city’s sewer system. He also mentioned that the city had “passed a balanced budget.”

The city manager spoke about pillars of the city’s strategic plan, ranging from investing in city staff and engaging the community to strengthening the city’s financial sustainability, and shared examples of how the city’s work last year aligned with it.

Then he moved into challenges the city faces. 

“They are pretty high level because we make mistakes just like I assume most people do, and, you know, there are opportunities for learning,” Mauro said. 

He described the challenge of keeping consultants on time and pace with the city and then spoke on misinformation.

“A second one is, it’s really hard to know when something that’s just not true is going to pop up and drive the narrative,” he said. “That often costs us time and money because we spend resources trying to either say that’s actually not the case or providing information on top of what people have already decided in their mind because they read it on Nextdoor or whatever it is. We’ll probably never get everything perfectly square, but we’ve learned lessons on how to do that preemptively so that we don’t have to have greater difficulty explaining what the actual policy decision is, for instance.” 

Last, Mauro acknowledged that “engagement fatigue is real” and said the city is working on creative ways to include more voices in conversations surrounding the city’s work. 

Looking forward to this year, Mauro mentioned the completion of the city’s Comprehensive Plan, an update to its Shoreline Master Plan and the condensing of the city’s strategic plan to include five pillars rather than seven. The current plan consists of the following: invest in our people, engage our community, innovate our systems, structures and processes, envision our sustainable future and deliver our priority initiatives, and deliver the basics.

Address attendees were then allowed to ask the mayor and city manager questions, which ranged from the impacts of federal turmoil on the city and housing to the sewer system and misinformation.