by Dan Mancuso
Our county commissioners are saying that the county needs to cut services and personnel. They might be correct as the Secure Rural Schools payments are likely to stop.
Trumps war with our neighbors to the north, where the U.S. gets nearly half of its wood, is going to create a demand for harvesting on our public lands. This puts tax dollars into the county coffers just like the good old days when the county didn’t charge residents property tax.
We all know that those who came before our current commissioners – could have, should have, and are negligent in my opinion, for not creating a trust for the logging tax revenue. If they did, we wouldn’t be where we are.
But the past is the past, and our current commissioners are very worried about cutting costs to meet the budget shortfall that is coming.
Just like Trump, they have offered for people to quit and get paid for 6 months while enjoying the summer or looking for other work. There are no stipulations that I know of and we could get just what we got last week: the loss of department heads.
It seems to me, that is exactly what they want to do, get rid of department heads and replace them with one or two people. Now keep in mind, the one or two people probably won’t have any experience in the areas they would lead. We have that now with Michael Sellers running Information Technology, Emergency Management, Finance and Human Resource departments so really, how bad could it be.
Interestingly enough to me, while our county commissioners are wringing their hands over how to cut the budget, they have time for other silly things.
For example, Commissioner Chris Barnett has decided we need to spend money making sure all the county vehicles have the same decals on the door. I’m not making this up, it’s a concern for him. He also seems to spend a lot of time on social media. He has started a new Facebook page called Josephine County Tribune. I have to assume it has something to do with his beef with the Grants Pass Tribune that is an online news outlet that covers Grants Pass.
Getting back to Barnett’s JoCo Tribune Facebook page – Recently, he posted a story about fake news and how media outlets make things up to make elected officials look bad. Barnett posted an “article,” from a fictious newspaper called the Maplewood Gazette. He created quotes from fictitious media consultants and used quotes from fictitious city councilors in the fictitious Maplewood U.S.A.
Maybe we should be happy with him wasting county money and fooling around on social media; after all, he could be spending time coming up with other wasteful ideas that are more expensive than logos on county vehicles.
Thank you for picking up this week’s paper. Enjoy!~ djm