Work together

Dear Editor,

In regard to comments from a council member, I'm totally humiliated by statements made regarding city-county cooperation efforts.

I'm an elected official, and I do remember what my job is, and that is to provide services for all the people of Red Willow County in the most efficient, but yet most conservative possible way. I feel as a county board, we do strive to work toward those efforts in the best possible way and still move into the future.

We have tried many times to reduce spending between the two entities, but every time there is any conversation, the answer from the city is "we need more money."

This is stupid, because we both collect from a lot of the same taxpayers, and I have a very hard time trying to figure out why we need to double- and sometimes triple-tax these people to provide these services that we are responsible for.

The county does not ask the city to pay for any services, but on the other hand, there are many services performed by the city in which they ask the county to help pay additional funds for when the city indeed already has people and money in place to take care of.

I think the city needs to clean their own step off before making too many comments. An example of that is all the high-priced wages that were printed in the paper recently. The county doesn't even come close to this level, but yet we're always questioned for paying out too much money to our people.

In ending, I just want to say that this councilman should be careful, because he works for both entities, or should I say, who is he working for? There's probably a huge conflict of interest issue here. It is time that we do indeed start working together. There are so many duplicated services that could be avoided. We need county-wide law enforcement, a jail that absolutely has to be a joint venture to be affordable, reasonable solutions to our water problem, etc.

Let's start working together instead of building personal empires so we do indeed work for all the people in Red Willow county.

Earl McNutt,

Red Willow County Commissioner.