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Show PAGE 4 THE ZEPHYR/SPECIAL ELECTION ISSUE..FEBRUARY 1993 District #1 Dale Mosher v. Charlie Peterson Zephyr: The budget for Grand County is now over $4 million. What in your experience qualifies you to handle such a responsibility? . Dale: Because I have managed two trucking companies, I’ve owned my own trucking company, and I now own a restaurant supply company here in Moab. All of them cost a lot of money to run. I feel I can help the county with their budget process. Charlie: Ihave had formal training and experience in financial management of similar size. But there was one old-timer in the district who said, "I could care less about all that stuff, what I would really like is that we can get council members who have common sense." I don’t pretend to have simple answers to some of the complex problems we are facing. But my approach is a simple approach, and I think that’s the way you approach budgetary matters. We are a small county, we have a very restricted revenue that we can count on, and all the county can do for people is what it can afford to do. Zephyr: The county’s financial performance has come under scrutiny recently. Over the past two years, do you feel the commission has done a good, or poor, job of financial management? Charlie: The county commission over the past couple of years has tried to have a day-to day, hands-on management of the county. I think that’s one of the reasons there has been dissatisfaction with the county. They have not been able to do that very well. I think that the way you run an organization of this magnitude—it’s one thing to ask a department or board for a budget and get the input of that department or board. But then the commission tends to just take a cursory look, and say, "we have to whack this out.” And they never send the budgets back to the departments to let the people closest to the problem try to solve the budgetary problem. Instead of saying, "we need to cut back 30 percent on your budget, now take another crack at it," they simply did the cutting for them. And I don’t think that’s worked, so you wind up with a lot of dissatisfaction and a budget that doesn’t work very well. It’s the commissioners’ budget, it’s not the departments’ budgets. Dale: I wouldn’t agree with Charlie on part of that. My wife works at the courthouse, and they have cut their budgets back two or three different times. The county commissioners will say "we've got to cut, where can we cut it?" And they would say, "well, we'll cut it down to where we don’t think we can get by with anything else." They'll go through it again and rework it and send it back to the commissioners. Some of them may not have gotten their budgets back. I know the seniors—we’re having a lot of trouble with the budget for the Senior Center this time. And that was partly because the board didn’t have input on the budget. But we were cut about $11,000 for the seniors this year, and I don’t think that’s right. The commissioners that were in there doing it, I know, didn’t really understand the budget process. In the years past, I've been on the Council on Aging for four years now, and we've worked real good with the commissioners. Zephyr: So do you feel the commission has done a good or poor job of financial management in recent years? Dale: From what I’ve seen I think they’ve done fairly good. Not excellent, but fairly good. Zephyr: Specifically, what would you cut or increase in the county budget? Dale: On cutting, we have a lot of duplication in Grand County. 1 would cut some of these services, and give them to others. There’s three or four of them, I won’t mention them— Zephyr: Oh, go ahead, mention them. Dale: They’re doing the job of the Chamber of Commerce. Any time I’ve ever called a city, I've called the chamber of commerce to get information, whether it was for business purposes or whether it was just going there as a tourist. Zephyr: Would you cut economic development? Dale: Economic development is really important, but it should be done by the business people that know what businesses will work here and which ones won’t. Our Chamber of Commerce is getting many phone calls that they have been ordered to pass these phone calls on to the Travel Council and economic development. And then they have calls later, nothing has been done about these calls. I don’t think that’s right. I think our chamber could do the job of a lot of these other agencies that are costing us a lot of tax money. Zephyr: Anything in the budget you would think of increasing? Dale: The senior budget. I would think increasing the advertising budget for the equestrian center would really help. Either that or get somebody that really knows advertising to do an advertising campaign. Then it would start paying for itself. » Charlie: Maybe this is a good point to express one of my frustrations. We're all ina kind of campaign mode now, when what seems to be the most commonly talked about subjects are what I would call policy. I get the feeling that the campaign is 90 percent policy and 10 percent management, and that after the election we're going to find out that the job becomes 90 percent management and 10 percent policy. So I don’t have any specific budgetary increases or decreases because I don’t have a good handle on how this whole thing manages. I don’t know that has ever been the case, that it has been managed well. Until we know the sources and the kinds of revenue and how they can be allocated, 1 am going to say that we'll try to listen_to 94 West 1st North * Moab, Utah 84532 (1 block west of Main Street) the boards and departments and try to allocate the revenues the best way we can. I don’t have any specific goals of what needs to be increased or decreased, because I honestly was not that involved in the existing budget. Now, I have a question for you. When you said the next budget, did you mean a year from now? Zephyr: I meant, what you see, over the next year or so, that needs to be increased or decreased. Charlie: I didn’t know if you meant the next budgetary process or the current one. Zephyr: Shouldn’t you as a candidate, at this point, be a little bit more in possession of the knowledge of how the financial management has been done? Charlie: What I’m trying to do at this point is try to educate myself about the whole county government organization. I acquired today a document that I didn’t know it existed. I talked to Peter Haney who is currently a commissioner and he didn’t know it existed. It was the last audit, for the year 1991. From that, some of the people in county government have prepared what is called a report, an annual report. I got my first look at that today. I honestly don’t know specific budgetary requests of departments. And until you can understand the whole picture, I for one am not willing to say the senior citizens get more, or the hospital gets less or the road money should be divided differently. Zephyr: On the Book Cliffs Road: do you support the current proposal of the Roads Special Service District? ve esis ig Charlie Peterson and Dale Mosher Dale: What is the current proposal, as you see it? Zephyr: The proposal contained in the environmental impact statement, to build a two-lane highway along the proposed or alternative routes. Charlie: No. Dale: No. Zephyr: The district has the power to go ahead with the project, if they win BLM approval. What would you do to stop that? Charlie: There are a couple of factors that need to be considered. I think one of the things that the new council ought to consider is the boundaries of the special district. Municipalities were excluded from the roads special service district. I think that makes the district not very responsible to all the people in the county. I believe that if the road board wants to proceed, they are proceeding in the face of public opposition, something like three fourths of the people oppose the present proposal. I don’t think that ought to be allowed to happen. Whether they can go ahead and do it, and shove it down the people's throats whether they want it or not, I guess, is something we’d have to find out. | think it would be an unwise use of energy and funds for different public boards and entities to fight each other. We have the county and the city fighting each other over who gets to control building projects within the city limits. And that’s a poor way to spend public money. Dale: Right now, there’s a lot of people don’t understand that there are two different fund sources that the road board has been talking about. One of them is a low interest loan that would have to go before the people for a vote before they could get that low interest loan. That is for the construction phase. The other monies, mineral lease monies and everything, they had to form the special service district to get that money coming in to Grand County. They have spent a lot of money on it, just trying to get the right of way, trying to get the EIS and everything. They've spent quite a bit of money on that, and I would hate to see them just give that up right now, without getting the right of way. Because I’ve been up there with oil companies for the last 20, 25 years, where they have wanted to build that road, straighten it, but they couldn’t because the county didn’t have a right of way through there. I would hate to see |