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You will have to look long and wide to find a tax that Shawn Woodward does not approve of.

Woodward is the “CEO” of one of the three largest employers in the county, the Lake Pend Oreille School District, with a claimed employment of 500 to 900. The wide disparity between employee numbers is the result of embellishment to gain levy funding, but Idaho Department of Education annual data consistently places LPOSD’s employee numbers around 550.

During his tenure, the biennial supplemental levy increased from $15.7 million in 2015 to $17 million in 2017 and now, in 2019, to $25.4 million. Simultaneously, LPOSD’s biennial budget grew from $31 million to $32.8 million to $34.9 million.

Note that during this timeframe the budget increase was $3.3 million, yet local funding, plus 7 percent increases in state funding and career-ladder teacher salary funding show an increase of $9.7 million and a very disproportionate amount in this biennial levy.

Wearing his hat as a Bonner General Hospital Districttrustee, Woodward has voted an annual 3 percent increase to support public tax funding of BGH, Inc., which the Idaho Attorney General’s office in a written opinion last October, found to be illegal. This increased funding of BGH, Inc., has contributed to the annual profits of the “non-profit” hospital averaging $981,000 over the past three years.

Woodward is, by all measures, a progressive liberal and a champion of growing the cost of government. He seems to have relinquished any grasp of the plight of less privileged families who send their children to his government schools and the hospital while struggling with the tax burden he places on them.

LOUIS PERRY

Sandpoint