Some Savings Yield Net Loss

Bonner County Commissioners Bud Mueller and Larry Allen aren’t anything if they’re not consistent.

The ultraconservative duo ran for office last fall promising to make budget cuts and reduce government. Unlike most politicians, they’ve delivered on their promises - maybe too much so.

In their first days in office, they shook up the status quo by eliminating the county building department. The action prompted several lawsuits and provided a glimpse of things to come. Now, as Idaho counties prepare their 1997-98 budgets, Mueller and Allen are at it again.

The county’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program is gone. The sheriff’s office lost a $22,000 grant because Mueller and Allen wouldn’t approve $2,000 in county matching funds. Now, the sheriff’s marine patrol is in jeopardy for lack of proper funding.

Mueller and Allen deserve some credit for treating the county budget like their own, scrutinizing every line item. But they’re in danger of becoming so penny-wise that the sheriff’s office won’t be able to perform its constitutional duty of protecting Bonner County’s far-flung waterways. Boaters who travel from all over the Inland Northwest to enjoy Lake Pend Oreille, Priest Lake and other waterways - and to pump money into Bonner County businesses - expect, and deserve, a certain level of police protection.

In a letter this week, Jeff E. Osborn of Spokane told of being rescued by Bonner County Sheriff Chip Roos and a deputy a month ago after his boat had overheated on Lake Pend Oreille. He was five miles from where he had put in. Wrote Osborn: “Without Roos and his deputy, we really would have been in deep water. I know they do this type of rescue all the time.”

They certainly do. On Tuesday, the marine patrol helped a wind surfer who’d gotten in trouble on Lake Pend Oreille. Earlier, deputies spent days searching the lake for the body of a trucker.

Yet, the proposed budget of $72,500 doesn’t provide enough money to cover salaries of a full-time deputy and five part-timers, not to mention fuel and moorage for four patrol boats. Said marine Sgt. Larry Schulze: “If we have a missing boater or a body lost in the water, we are not going to have the money to go out looking for them.”

Bonner County has the most water in Idaho to patrol, about 192 square miles - or nearly three times as much as Kootenai County, which has three times the marine budget. Bonner County should be looking for ways to increase funding for this basic service - not for ways to chop it.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = D.F. Oliveria/For the editorial board