Time for fiscal sanity in Island County | LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Published 7:38 am Monday, October 25, 2010

To the editor:

With the quickly approaching election, I read with interest Jessie Stensland’s article about Kelly Emerson and John Dean’s contest for a seat on the Island County commission.

There were two things obviously missing in Ms. Stensland’s article. The first was objectivity. It was a piece clearly written from a point of view that discounts the abilities and opinions of Kelly Emerson.

I met Ms. Emerson about three months ago. She has shown herself to be a candidate who is willing to put in whatever hours and effort are necessary to become fully informed on the critical issues facing Island County.

The budget is the foremost of those issues. She has become an expert and outspoken critic of the commission on this topic. This in spite of the lack of candor and convoluted information the commission, including John Dean, recently provided online in a last-minute attempt to get public input on their budget decisions.

Secondly, the article is replete with comments analyzing Ms. Emerson’s knowledge and positions on issues. The article is absolutely lacking any such analysis of John Dean’s knowledge and positions on issues. No reporter analysis was included when Commissioner Dean hatefully and maliciously stated that “Her (Ms. Emerson’s) motivation is to overthrow government.” This was obviously a false and desperate comment from a candidate who knows that his actions in office and lack of leadership do not warrant his re-election.

As an aside, in the meetings with commissioners that I have attended over my five years on Whidbey, the meetings in the past two years clearly displayed shared knowledge and decisions by the three seated commissioners that would suggest that perhaps communication, indirect or direct, had taken place in a non-public forum.

It is time for a change to bring truly open government and fiscal sanity to Island County. To achieve this end requires the election of Kelly Emerson to the Island County commission.

Rod R. Mourant

Freeland