Congratulations, condolences

Congratulations! According to last Tuesday’s Gazette, real property valuations are up for the City of McCook. By setting the same levy as last year the City of McCook will get $28,687 more from property taxes than was realized last year. An easy solution: decrease the levy to meet the $1.39 million preliminary figure that was used to create the new budget. Most taxpayers in McCook don’t really want to pay more, ever more, taxes each year. There is no ratchet to keep the levy from decreasing so simply lower the levy to meet the projected income.

Oh, you say it doesn’t work that way. City staff will look at the “extra” $28,l87 as a bonus and just increase the budget to accommodate. For sure they can find a place to spend that extra money and that will be the floor for next year’s budget. You and I won’t have a say in the matter.

Actually, we do have a say and that is through exerting a little influence on those we elect to the City Council. The City Staff proposes the budget but it is the Council who approves. If the Council says the levy is to be decreased to meet that amount proposed by the original budget that is what the levy will be. Watch the vote and remember next time that they run for office and vote for them accordingly.

Now the County has the opposite problem. Countywide valuations are down so projected revenue will also be down. It may be time to do a little sharp knife cutting of the budget to make ends meet. Again it would be hard to find any property owner that thinks taxes should be raised in today’s economy.

Nepotism the granting promotion or favors based on kinship. Looking into the item I discussed in last week’s column concerning the hiring of relatives to work in county jobs there are two definitions. The county’s employee manual states that a supervisor can’t oversee a relative, wife, daughter, son or in-law and that probably includes grandchildren. The state of Nebraska defines the same thing but limits it to not supervising a relative that lives under the same roof. In other words if your daughter is married and lives with her family in a different household she can still work for you and draw county pay. It may be time that the board of commissioners get their heads together and decide what is right for Red Willow County. With our limited labor pool from which to draw county employees this old former commissioner doesn’t see a problem but it would be something to keep an eye on. All politics are local!

A word about Senator John McCain. May his soul rest in peace. In the military, I consider him a near-peer. I am in awe of how he endured his time in the Hanoi Hilton as a POW during the Vietnam War. It took great courage for him to refuse the enemy’s offer to repatriate him early when they found out that his father was the Chief of Naval Operations in that area of conflict. For the North Vietnamese it would have been a great PR move but no matter how horrible the conditions in which our POWs were being held McCain refused. The POWs had adopted a protocol that they would only accept repatriation in the order that they had been incarcerated, medical necessity excepted. That decision on McCain’s part took a supreme amount of courage and I have always held him in the highest regard for doing just that.

Since then I have not always approved how McCain conducted his affairs. I guess he was only human. I did vote for him for president, Sarah Palin too, and will always feel that they would have been a far better team than Obama and Biden.

That is how I saw it.

Dick Trail