September 10, 2012
Monday

Dear Editor,  

I read a letter to you saying Ketchikan is in debt for $128 million.  Hard to believe with the fine leadership and management we have had in this town.  It doesn't matter anyway all their friends are doing quite well and the manager's personal account is bulging.  So why should we common citizens worry?  They never worried in the Soviet Union, spend - spend - spend.

As Oral Freeman used to say, "It takes no brains to spend someone else's money".  And we do have a plethora of "no brains" in government especially locally.

Let me do a quick list off the top of my head:

A library that built on the Lewis motor site could have come in at 3 million tops is now pushing $20 million!

A police department that is so overpaid, over equipped, and overstaffed that they drive SUV's into the bay to get rid of them.  

A fire department that gets a seaside fire hall to drive their 4 wheelers around in.

Anybody looked at the price of waterfront property as opposed to Bear Valley, etc.  Also overstaffed.  A ladder truck to each ambulance call!  Overstaffed beyond imagination with nothing to do.  What happened to our workable and affordable volunteer department of the past.

A hospital that we pay every dime of improvement on and give to PeaceHealth so that they can charge us three to four times what the 'for profit' hospitals charge down below.

Hundreds of millions spent on "Power" projects with whole new bureaucracies and little to no new power.

KPU leasing expensive mall properties for their overstaffed crew.  

Free cars and gas to almost every city employee.  They can't even tell you how many they have or how much gas they burn per year!  This is in a town of 8000!

Public projects that have to be rebuilt before they are even finished.

Water that is poisoned (I get a letter every quarter for the past twenty five years telling me so.)

I am running out of paper before I am even starting to run out of ideas.  We need a completely new city council that will do their jobs instead of becoming the city manager's sycophants.  Speaking of which, a city manager is like dead fish they start to smell and should be changed often.  This one reeks to high heaven.

We need people who believe in small and efficient, emphasize efficient, government.  What Republicans used to claim they were for years ago before they got their noses in the trough.

In closing while we have the kind of "leadership" we do in city or any government then we will endeavor to spend ourselves into oblivion.  "$128 million ain't nothing" compared to where we're heading.  We need a new city manager immediately with a reasonable salary and a new council to actually run things.  Until that happens we will be saddled with the grossly mismanaged, bloated government we have.

Look around your neighbors for good people in the future and convince the ones who truly do not want to run to run for one term.  I say this because it seems very apparent that the ego to run and promote themselves goes hand in hand with the inability to do a good job for the community.  

I am not running for anything and will not but I am voting against all incumbents.

After all they got us where we are!

Sincerely,

Douglas Thompson
Ketchikan, AK

Representations of fact and opinions in letters are solely those of the author.
The opinions of the author do not represent the opinions of Sitnews.