Subject: Fwd: Letter to the Herald Editor 10/19/09
In hard times, many people don’t heat part of their homes to save on utilities. It's called consolidation; you make do with what you have. You would never think of adding an addition when money is tight.
Yet our County Administrator proposes to give the Chippewa County Economic Development Corporation $175,000 in the hope that it will buy us some “additions” that we can't afford to pay for anyway. I wonder if that includes the nearly $20,000 that CCEDC gets payed to market the Lake Wissota Business Park, a not so brilliant economic development "addition" built by our economic planners.
I believe it is malfeasance to give taxpayer money to Charlie Walker, CEO of CCEDC. Walker, according to the August 30, 2005 Fairbanks Alaska Daily News MIner, was fired from the Fairbanks Economic Development Corporation for ethics violations. CCEDC refuses to open any of their records that would help us learn how Walker came to be hired, given his past history.
Then there is the issue of the large raises for select county employees. Bill Reynolds, our unelected leader whose pronouncements seem to be taken as gospel by our County Board since he is seldom opposed, is asking for a raise for his assistant and others, justifying it by saying that it is more fair. To my mind it is enough that they keep their jobs in this recessionary market at the wage they agreed to work for when they were hired. The act of firing some and giving raises to others is unconscionable.
If we don't fund CCEDC and don't OK the Bill Reynolds wage hikes, we have enough to fund the foresters and keep the land conservationist department intact. It's called, taking care of what you already have. This budget wants to fund more “additions” when we can't afford to heat the useless additions already built by the misguided economic planning of this county and city.
