Proud of City Council's action

Monday the 18th I returned to my old haunt, the McCook Council Chamber, to watch our present Council in action.

Since I left the Council in December I've seldom been back but now I feel it time to quietly watch and to speak out in a different forum.

It was impressive to see Water and Sewer Superintendent Jesse Dutcher proudly parade his crew before the citizens assembled in the chamber. Jesse praised his men for recently spending 40 hours straight repairing a major water leak.

Jesse was proud of "his" crew and rightly so. Jesse neglected to mention that he too was elbow deep in mud working right alongside his men during the entire ordeal. It is refreshing to see Jesse's hands on style of leadership receiving deserved recognition.

With no discussion, the Council formally received the title to 1.24 acres of land to be used to connect the new city wells to the now building water purification plant. The land was "sold" to the City for the princely sum of $1. Not mentioned was the fact that the land donated came from the estate of the late Don Thompson. Don had a pivotal role in growing this community by helping develop irrigation, enabling the construction of reservoirs on the Republican River, and long time service on the Fair Board as well as the Nebraska Legislature. The family's selfless service continues with this donation of land by his daughter Jerda Svengalis and the other heirs.

From the altruistic attitude of the Thompson family the Council then moved into a clash of two titanic egos. Sheriff Gene wants a new jail and Chief Ike wants to keep his empire intact.

The Red Willow County Board has for several years been studying the feasibility of building a new county jail and has been asking the City to sit down with them and discuss the matter. The present system of utilizing the City Jail and transporting prisoners to be held in neighboring counties has worked well, the least cost solution to date. Possibly in the future (near?) it will be necessary to make other arrangements and a brand new local county jail would enhance the sheriff's empire many fold. 

A citizen's committee, including police Chief Ike Brown, has determined that it makes sense to incorporate a Sheriff's office and dispatching center into the jail, if built. The city could then close their jail and the County asked that possibly the City Police Department could also be housed in the same building as a combined Law Enforcement Center. The city staff had been asked by the council to check into the matter, and it became obvious that neither Ike Brown nor John Bingham was in favor of participating into the -- no cost to the City -- feasibility study to be paid entirely by the County.

Possibly John Bingham was not in favor of a new jail because the County Board has vowed to have the public vote on a bond issue to build the thing. John has to date successfully avoided any chance of a public vote on any expenditure of public money.

I was proud of the Council showing initiative by overruling the City Staff and electing to participate in the feasibility study. Phil Lyons voted against participating but it is hard to tell where Phil is coming from. Was he representing his employer the County, or was he representing his constituents in the City or was he representing the wishes of the "C Street Mafia"?

Phil pleaded the case of putting an undue burden of taxes on the local taxpayer in addition to paying for the water treatment plant but neglected to mention that an acceptable water solution could have been had for half the current plan's cost except for his record of fighting all other proposed solutions.

Chief Ike and Fire Chief Harpham then pleaded to the Council to trade our present safety center for the East Ward school location right in the center of town. Many of their arguments made sense except for little detail of additional cost involved. The large delegation of neighbors to East Ward was not swayed and applauded the Council's decision to veto the proposed swap.

It is interesting that no mention was made of a regional jail. McCook is the retail center for a large portion of southwest Nebraska an area that could logically support a jail to serve the same population. In this era of instant communication, in-cluding E-911, one collocated combined dispatch center could serve the same area. But then that is thinking outside the box.

Dick Train,

McCook

-- Trail is a former county commissioner as well as city councilman.