Letters for March 13, 2023
New jail
I saw in the newspaper that the board of county commissioners hired an advertising consultant to drum up support for the county’s new jail and assorted spending requests. Well, the county should save that money and use that to fund the jail with no new taxes.
The answer just came in the mail from the county treasurer. What a novel idea if the commissioners are looking for money and they want us to vote on a new tax, why don’t they talk to the treasurer? My taxes in the past five years have increased through valuations by the assessor by a whopping 57.3%, so now I pay $563.24 more than I did five years ago. This is astonishing but the real shock is this year our levy rate actually dropped from $8.16/100,000 to $6.58/100,000. This runaway valuation from the assessor’s office is a whopping yearly increase with no expectation that it will stop or go down. Given this income stream coming into the county, it could fund the new jail without raising the sales tax.
The commissioners have not done their due diligence in showing what the expenditures in the county are and how much the county receives in yearly revenues. Do this and some folks may say a tax might be justified. The whole package is a little fishy. There are too many unanswered questions and an advertising consultant can’t fix that. For me, no on the new jail!
Doug Frederick
Spokane
Threat to democracy
There’re assaults on “democracy,” then there’re assaults on “democracy.”
In the one case, there’s hitherto withheld Jan. 6, 2021, video of a bizarrely costumed man wandering through parts of the U.S. Capitol building seemingly by himself, except for the varying number of Capitol police officers accompanying him.
In the second case, the above mentioned fellow’s attorney has publicly and unequivocally stated that the stewards of our federal justice system knowingly broke their oaths to faithfully execute their duties as prescribed by the laws of our land.
It’s left to you, the American citizenry to discern which case is the greater threat to this nation’s “democracy,” slam dunk, n’est-ce pas?
William Baxley
Spokane