Vote to stop city’s lack of accountability | Letters | May 8

Published 10:39 am Friday, May 8, 2009

If you would not ask a proctologist to do brain surgery, why would you entrust an agenda-driven politician to manage a $50 million enterprise?

Our present form of government bears witness to that approach and it doesn’t work.

The mayor-council system is systemically flawed. The present administration has defined this weakness and recent financial revelations have demonstrated the catastrophic results.

Regrettably, we have been made painfully aware that this is not Mayberry. This is a bedroom community that does not have a base of employment.

The unpleasant fact is that the interests of all islanders are not equal priorities yet the financial burdens to implement a limited agenda fall upon all of our citizens. The formation of COBI involved nothing more than appending the rest of the island to the Winslow government.

The record speaks for itself. Resources have been squandered and diverted to a Winslow-centric agenda at the expense of and to the detriment of the rest of the island.

Traditionally there has been no accountability and the council has failed to call the administration to task because it does not have the ability to do so. The staff works for the mayor.

Information is filtered through and encapsulated by the staff, which does not answer to the council.

Although the island is an enterprise paid for by tax dollars, these dollars are not an endless source. Heretofore, the message that these funds are not provided to underwrite the interests of a limited few have been consistently ignored.

Tax dollars have been squandered with impunity because there is no accountability nor is there a transparent information base for the citizens of the island to judge the true measure of the failure of this administration to serve the interests of all of our community.

There are those that have opined that islanders should not have a direct voice because they are “too contentious.” I believe those of that opinion would be better served by the form of government that is now practiced in Zimbabwe; the results are similar.

Islanders are paying for a Rolls Royce government and they have gotten a used Yugo that has four flat tires, an empty gas tank and a blown engine.

Frederick J Scheffler

Bainbridge Island