4/3/12 SHELTON MEETINGS IN REVIEW

TOM'S TALES OF TUESDAY

Submitted to Shelton Blog by Tom Davis Mason County Progressive

If it’s Tuesday, it must be time to tell the truth about what is going on in the County.

April 3, 2012

9:00 AM: Regular session of Board of County Commissioners (BOCC)

The agenda was as packed as the chambers, with eleven action items and five public hearings. Item 8.8 was the first hot ticket: Approval to raise the pay of Vicki Kirkpatrick, Director of Public Health and Human Services, from pay range 39 to 45. The particulars of this issue were discussed previously in a 2/28/12 post, titled "Agenda Watch". But read it fast because right from the bell the public came out swinging, and two minutes into the first round Ms. Kirkpatrick’s pay raise hit the canvas like a bucket of meat.

Next up were five public hearings, four of which are not worthy of reporting. Which brings us to the big dog: Hearing No. 9.2.3, an innocuous sounding issue, but judging from the public’s reaction, packed all the punch of gay marriage, religious persecution and puppy abuse rolled into one. Read it and weep:

Hearing No. 9.2.3: $218,404 budget transfer from Ending Fund Budgeted Balance for the Mason County Sheriff’s Office.

The breakdown for the Sheriff's request is as follows:

1) Byrne Grant Computers $17,880.00
2) MACECOM $45,502.00
3) Sergeant Salary $61,236.00
4) Chief Salary .6FTE $44,784.00
5) Sergeant Salary .5FTE $35,514.00
6) Industrial Insurance $ 1,523.00
7) Social Security $ 6,143.00
8) State Retirement $ 5,822.00

Total: $218,404

Supporting Information:

Byrne Grant: $17,301 to purchase patrol computers. The revenue was budgeted but not the expenditure.

MACECOM: $45,502 higher than what was budgeted and approved.

Sergeant Salary: $61,236.00. A clerical error in submitting the 2012 budgets for the jail operations inadvertently omitted this item.

Items 5-8: As a result of the setting of the Traffic Policing Road Diversion at $875,000, and subsequent reduction in the adopted CE 2012 Budget to that level for Traffic Policing, MCSO needs to move two partial supervisory FTE’s from the Traffic Policing budget to the Sheriff’s Patrol budget, to include their proportionate Industrial Insurance, Social Security and State Retirement costs in the amount of $93,786.

I’ll leave Items 1-4 to your discretion, but Items 5-8 belong to me.

Here’s what happened:

It was a dark and stormy night in November 2011, as County Commissioners plotted to reduce the Sheriff’s Traffic Policing budget by $125,000. But what the Commissioners did not know was that this particular $125,000 was the glue that held together the entire Sheriff’s Office, and without which our County would experience a crime spree the likes of which we had never known.

Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but when Sheriff Casey took a swing at the Commissioners in his Mason County Daily News post of December 8, 2011, he made it very clear that if the County cut $125,000 out of his 9.6M budget, there would be no joy in Mudville.

I watched this story unfold, and I’m here to tell you that the Sheriff’s department is in no danger of collapsing, nor will citizens notice any change in the crime rate: your jet-ski will still go missing from your carport, and you’ll still wake to an empty toolbox in your pick-up truck. In other words, everything will be just as it is now.

Overall crime in Mason County is already high, and it’s not going to get any worse because Commissioners cut a few bucks out of the Traffic Policing Budget. Instead of trying to scare the public into submission, the Sheriff’s Office might want to focus on the unacceptable number of property crimes and their dismal clearance (crimes solved) rate, and leave the drama and finger wagging to the public.

Why were County Commissioners so adamant about cutting the Sheriff’s Traffic Policing budget, and then so docile about approving $93,000 in supplemental appropriations to offset the very same cutback? That is the question. Only Commissioner Bloomfield seemed to recognize the irony. A good caption to go along with the deafening silence of the other two Commissioners might be: “Okay, we’ll give you the money, this time, but don’t you ever dare pull a trick like that in a non-election year.”

2:00 PM: Port of Shelton Commission Meeting

A Public Hearing for Amending the Port’s Forest Management Plan:

Right from the get-go it felt like the public was going to get the bum’s rush: Dick Taylor took to the room like Admiral Nimitz, and announced testimony will be limited to three minutes per each member of the non-commissioned public. The fact there were only two of us who signed up to testify seemed not to be particularly relevant, leaving the crew with an impression that the ship had already listed heavily to starboard (that’s, far right, for all you landlubbers).

We were instructed to limit our comments to the Port’s Forestry Plan, and not to address the 100 acres of merchantable timber along Capitol Hill Road they wanted to harvest. But in mutinous fashion, both speakers ignored the warning and launched into some very good reasons why harvesting timber on Port property might be counterproductive to their primary mission of attracting new business.

But we might as well have saved our breath, because Commissioner Wallitner’s loose lips pretty much sunk our ship when he revealed that the reason the trees needed to be harvested was to fund the Port’s capital improvement projects. What this means is that the very municipality charged with growing our economy is in such poor financial shape that it has to sell trees to fund their plans.

Somewhere there’s a plank out there that needs walking.

Written public comment pertaining to the Port's Forest Management Plan will be accepted till April 11th, at 4:00 PM.

HAPPY EASTER!

Graphic: mediabistro.com