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An open letter to Commissioner Dan McDonald:

I met with the Bonner County clerk on Friday, April 27, to discuss your claim that you have saved the county $8.5 million (or more). We reviewed budgets for this year and previous years and the result of this review is that the county clerk cannot produce any evidence of you saving the county this money.

In fact, when I directly asked where is the $8.5 million you saved, the answer was “… it never existed …”. It does not exist because you didn’t save it. What you and the other commissioners did was to set a responsible $57.2 million budget ($3.5 million less than last year), because we do not have the revenue we had last year. You were forced to cut county department budgets because the county doesn’t have the revenue, not because you were saving money.

In fact, the clerk stated that we will need to continue with the maximum 3 percent levy increase over the next few years in order to keep our county solvent. So how did you save money, Dan? Our taxes will increase!

GLENN ROHRER

Priest River