The Pacific Grove City Council’s plan to steer the municipal budget into calm fiscal waters has rocked the boat of business-as-usual in America’s Last Hometown. Now, PG leaders are getting flak from the self-described “Good Old Boys” who used to run the city.

In recent months, City Manager Jim Colangelo and a fiscal advisory subcommittee have directed the City Council to steady a budget that slipped from a $2.9 million surplus in 2000-01 to a $500,000 shortfall this fiscal year. Under Colangelo’s guidance the Council contracted financial consultants, hired a budget director, cut department head positions and created several new administrative posts. Colangelo has also publicly considered various service cuts, taxes and fee increases.

Those moves—coupled with Colangelo’s and Mayor Dan Cort’s assertions that past fiscal irresponsibility stuck the city in its current quagmire—haven’t sat well with some former city leaders. Private grumbling became a public gripe on Mar. 21, when the Pacific Grove Hometown Bulletin published an open letter criticizing Cort for telling the Weekly that “this city, over the last 20 years, has not been watching the ship.”

“It’s a bunch of old geezers who have been kicked out of power.”

“That’s just a flat-out lie, and I was so angered by that statement that I drafted a letter,” says former PG Mayor Morrie Fisher, who gathered signatures from two other former mayors and eight former councilmembers, and paid to run the letter as an advertisement in the Bulletin. The letter alleges that Cort is attempting “to lay blame on others for what has not been accomplished in the last over two years by this Council and City Manager.”

Fisher complains that Colangelo lacks experience, is overpaid and wields too much power over the City Council. He also accuses him of hiring “his lady friends from the county” for high-level positions created under the February reorganization—a reference to Administrative Services Director Charlene Wiseman, who will be reclassified as Deputy City Manager, and Public Works Supervisor Celia Perez Martinez, who became the department’s leader with the recent layoff of the director. Colangelo worked with both women as a county administrator.

“They have a gal running the Public Works department now,” Fisher says.

In addition to the open letter, the Mar. 21 Bulletin ran an editorial criticizing Colangelo’s reorganization plan, particularly his hiring of outside financial consultants and his recommendation to create new positions while eliminating others.

CPA Barry Dolowich, who serves on the council’s fiscal advisory subcommittee, called the Bulletin’s accusations “outright lies.” The current City Council inherited depleted reserves, bookkeeping that didn’t reconcile with audits, an unbalanced budget and a staff lacking in financial expertise, he said at the Mar. 21 meeting. “Blaming this council for the current financial mess is ludicrous,” he said, directing his comments to Bulletin owner Lee Yarborough, who unsuccessfully challenged Cort for mayor in 2006, and reporter Bruce Obbink, who lost his 2004 bid for Council. “Shame on you.”

Dolowich says the former city leaders who signed the open letter also have axes to grind. “Morrie is suing the City for free golf. [Former Councilman Ron] Schenk got elected out of office. [Former Councilman Don] Gasperson is an old fart who’s trying to get into Forest Hill Manor,” he says. “It’s a bunch of old geezers who play golf together who have been kicked out of power, and now they’ve been caught with their pants down.”

Mayor Cort maintains that former leaders did contribute to PG’s current fiscal slump—most notably by approving the publicly unpopular golf clubhouse, which costs the City about a quarter million dollars per year in debt service. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” he says. “All these people lost [the elections] because of these decisions. We inherited this problem, and we’ve been trying to fix it.”