Political advice

The email read in part: "...because you have a keen insight into life here in southwest Nebraska....I would like to come and sit down with you ...to talk about what you feel a state senator needs to know about McCook and the 44th district in order to be an effective representative for us in Lincoln."

Heady stuff here. "Keen insight" wow. Your humble correspondent professes only to write about how he sees, feels and reacts to the constantly changing scene around him. Like every other person, he can only react to what he experiences physically, hears in personal conversation, reads in print or sees and hears from electronic media.

The perfect State Senator should go to Lincoln, vote his conscience, spend only two terms and come back home to tend to whatever business made him successful in the first place. People in Southwest Nebraska strongly believe in term limits. It works for presidents and it works for state representatives. "Him" in this case refers to the gent who wrote but an effective "her" can also be a pearl without price. I refer to the memory of Virginia Smith.

Be frugal. We already have way more state government than we need! Get rid of people in make work jobs, those that hamper progress by requiring environmental studies, permits to build or make improvements. If they have no skin in the game, as in put money down, they aren't needed in the decision making process. No need to micromanage. You in the Legislature control the budget. Simply cut money allocated to bloated governmental entities and those in charge will cut excess personnel. Those managers will squeal like hogs caught under a gate but it is either slash where needed or they too can look for another job.

We the people who produce know that government money to build fancy new hospitals, school buildings, gyms, public safety buildings etc. comes with a price and must be paid back. Besides that "free" government money, the modern term is "grants", always comes with strings attached.

Get rid of the statutes that allow local, county and state governmental units to lease purchase or in other sneaky ways to encumber future tax revenues without the requirement of passing a ballot decided bond issue. The present new standard requires bidding only for items over $100,000. Too high! Reduce that amount to less than the cost of a new automobile, which by the way the State owns way too many.

The county government layout in Nebraska was designed in the late 1800s. We have too many counties each with its full slate of offices. Good people each and every county employee, but with modern communications, most services are duplicated several times over. We are way long on law enforcement, city police, county sheriffs, state patrol, brand inspectors, weights and measures, game wardens -- the list goes on. Vast savings could be realized through combining and eliminating expensive duplicated jobs.

Good roads are vital to this far-flung empire. Funding transportation infrastructure through gas taxes works great. We like the present system that actually pays the rural back more than we put in. Not so popular in the larger cities, but the economic lifeblood of Nebraska comes from agriculture and rural is spread out.

Water, lifeblood to irrigated agriculture huge in the 44th District, is near crisis. Poor decisions and oversight by past legislatures put us in thrall to Kansas. The Legislature usurped their authority to the NRDs who are proving incapable of solving the competing interests of surface and deep well irrigation. Fix it or economic disaster looms for this area.

Schools. We hate sending the greater portion of our taxes earmarked for education to the state to be portioned back to our home districts all with strings attached. We simple rural people somehow know that we are able to make decisions in the best educational interests of our kids locally. We want no part of the liberal socialist leaning advice we get from educational purse holding elites at state and federal who force dumb rules down on our kids.

The work ethic of farm-raised kids has been in great demand in industry and especially the military throughout our wonderful country. Rural kids learn it by working on family farms. They do chores, they tend to livestock, they operate machinery -- physical labor is not foreign to them. Get rid of the minimum wage which prevents so many young kids from entering the work force to earn their own money and learn to become productive individuals.

We rural people are a bit suspicious of the pack of lobbyists and special-interest political action committees that hang around the State House in Lincoln. We feel that too much money promised for voting, or leaning, in a certain direction somehow is not in the best interests of we the people. Stand apart of such corrupting interests and vote what you know in your heart is best for the voters that sent you to represent them in the first place.

Yeah I know. If I am such an expert in politics why am I, your humble correspondent, not running for office myself? Well I've been there and done that. I now have other interests and a bucket list of things to share with Grannie Annie in the numbered days we have left. Besides that I have a pretty good bully pulpit in writing this column and plan on keeping at it as long as the Good Lord allows.

That is how I saw it.

Dick Trail