Over the last four years, our Board of County Commissioners has struggled to do what is best for our County.
The BOCC hired an unqualified, detrimental County Manager while his wife was the County HR Director, an ethical error. Lawsuits ensued of varying sorts, and then he was paid tens of thousands of dollars after he was let go.
Over $40,000 was wasted on HR software that never worked.
There’s been a hiring spree expanding our government by 22 employees in a mere six months, along with increased benefits, wages and bonuses far exceeding comparable private sector compensation, thereby competing against our local businesses for valuable staff.
The BOCC unsuccessfully promoted an increase in our sales tax with Ballot Measure 1A while allowing our property taxes to skyrocket.
Those who appealed their property valuations saw some of the Commissioners fail to even read what was presented by homeowners.
The downtown Courthouse, on prime real estate, was sold in a suspicious fashion for less than $700,000, curiously leaving us with an urgent and dire need for a replacement. We haven’t even paid off the new courthouse yet.
Once again we’re about to spend too much on yet another government building. Remember the jail and the courthouse debacle? We the people voted for budgetary restraint, but the BOCC vetoed our decision.
Here we go again.
Our roads are in dreadful condition. We have muddy, dusty, potholed dirt roads within walking distance of town limits while the 2024 road budget was reduced significantly to spend the money elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the new, tiny and unnecessary 6,500 sq. ft. transportation center was to cost an absurd $4.8 million, but now has an incurred an additional $250,000 in cost overruns we get to pay for, because nobody thought of looking for bedrock in the Rocky Mountains. Did we even vote to spend that $5 million?
The taxpayers have paid in excess of $53,000 in legal fees alone for ethics violations of a current and a previous Commissioner for explicitly voting to reimburse themselves for mileage to and from work.
Our airport operates at a loss of $500,000 annually while serving a tiny minority of residents.
Granted, not all of our current Commissioners condoned these wasteful blunders, but the current BOCC displays a uniform absence of cooperation and shared common goals such as fiscal responsibility, effective planning and prioritization, striving for smaller government, and making decisions based on voter input rather than forcing their opinions on us.
We are presented with a golden opportunity to elect an effective “team” of Commissioners. If you’d like to see collaboration, experience, fiscal responsibility, transparency and taxpayer representation in this County, let’s give Commissioner Veronica Medina a powerful, competent team to work with: Commissioner Candidate John Ranson and Commissioner Candidate Wayne Hooper. This will assure us the best path forward.
Elect John and Wayne. Easy to remember.
Marybeth Snyder
Pagosa Springs, CO