Letter - Bales handles budgets extremely well

To the editor:

A letter to the editor cited the county’s fiscal woes. How would you describe them? Is it only Douglas, or other counties experiencing fiscal woes?

What if the average citizen made a list of basic needs and services that the county should provide? What would the list look like? Would we not find a wide disagreement? Would we have difficulty getting consensus? What if we were to attach prices to the list? Would we not find a similar pattern of disagreement over cost? Would it be almost impossible to find consensus?

So how do we resolve this?

Some would say, take an arbitrary figure and get sides to agree, crunch down the prices to fit that figure. Others say that you need to agree on each need, establish a price, and add the items up. Now the discussion would begin about total cost.

Budget building is difficult. Do we have too many needs? Can we intentionally underfund needs while knowing that the money will not be adequate? If you say that taxes are too high, what process have you used to determine your opinion?

Keep our experienced Commissioner Bev Bales working for us on this critical part of the job.

Robert Mostad

Osakis, MN

(A paid political letter)

Tags: opinion, letters