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Show PAGE 6 THE ZEPHYR/SPECIAL ELECTION ISSUE..FEBRUARY 1993 2S District #2 Ken Ballantyne v. Adair White Zephyr: Fiscal responsibility is of great concern to the voters in this election. What can you point to in your own life that would assure voters that you can responsibly manage their tax dollars? Ken: My wife...No, I have to make expenditures in my own life. I don’t want to far-exceed my income. I guess I’m conservative in my fiscal ideas. I don’t believe in spending money before you have it and I believe in spending it wisely after you obtain it. Frivolous expenditures can be made, but only after all the basic necessities have been dealt with. The government has to run the same way. Federally it hasn’t been. On the state and local level, it tries to, but could probably be done better in the sense of priorities. Adair: Jokingly, I made the comment the other day that we needed a woman on the council to manage money, because the guys spend it, but we're used to squeezing the last dollar out of it. It’s a joke but I also think it’s very true. I’d like to give you some of my background...I’ve been in business for myself, so right there, I’m used to budgets and being fiscally responsible. But I’ve also been a school teacher, a case worker. I’ve worked for Mesa County and Fresno County in California. In these you have to be fiscally responsible. Some of the things I learned in those two counties that I would bring to this job. Zephyr: The county had a substantial budget deficit this year. What would you try to cut to balance the budget? Ken: I haven’t looked at the total budget. I think that the things that need to be tibet care of are the things that affect people directly. Roads, public safety issues, sewer and water, they need to be dealt with. They need to be dealt with in line with projected revenues. Zephyr: Are there places in last year’s budget that could have been cut? Ken: Not without looking at all the different departments. Adair: I got a copy of the budget and looked at it real close. It was difficult to even read the budget; it was incomprehensible. We almost need a different format to make sense out of the present budget. That includes the service district budgets as well. We need to look there too, because they need to be fiscally responsible to the county. I went to a road board meeting on Saturday morning, and as an example, the mineral lease money in the Utah Code said we were to receive 40 cents an acre; Jimmie Walker said instead of getting 40, we got 11 cents. I asked why we weren't getting 40 cents and they said*they were going to look into that. There are some things out there where we need to start. Zephyr: What about some of the issues in the past, for example, the Hastings Road project, the courthouse expansion, the equestrian center, the Keystone Pits? Did you support all these projects? Ken: You have boards and people set in place to give you the best information possible. The commissioners have the responsibility to at least listen. Take the Hastings Road for example. Dave Warner, the county roads foreman, thinks we can do it for $800,000. They’re talking $3 million. Why in the world do you put somebody in charge of county roads and then not listen to what he has to say? The Keystone Pits...that’s in San Juan County. That's their problem. I don’t see any reason why we should consider owning something in another county. The possibility of liability is great. The equestrian center, I guess at the time, it sounded like a good idea. Now we have it. Often, I hear people say we should run counties like a business. To a degree, I think that’s true. But with a business, the motive is profit; there shouldn’t be profit for the county. On the other hand, we shouldn’t say, we’ve got tax dollars, let’s spend them. Adair: I know nothing about the Hastings road, I’d have to research it more. Keystone Pits..it’s like when we sell property in town that has these gas tanks on them, you have to go back and research it. When they were talking about the pits, they weren’t thinking about the liability. And the courthouse, those contracts probably need to be reviewed which relates to my work experience as a real estate agent. Zephyr: On the courthouse, would you have preferred performance bonds on the work that’s being done? Adair: There should be. Ken: There’s not. It’s a wise business practice to do that. They did require one for the new visitor center. Zephyr: Once again, for the record, where do each of you stand on the Book Cliffs Road? And did the meeting on Saturday change your minds any? Ken: It did change my mind in the sense of how I felt. My feelings came from talking to people while I was getting the signatures and others. The general consensus was they are not in favor of the road. Now the reasons ranged from we don’t want it, period, to we want to keep it like it is, to it’s in a stupid location. If the project was ever deemed absolutely necessary, putting it out there in Cisco doesn’t make any sense to me. If they want to extend 191, let’s do that.. that makes more economic sense for Grand County. Adair: Didn’t they say it crossed Indian lands. Ken: There’s a problem with Indian lands (going up Sego Canyon) but I don’t see that the road ae AKA_RUBY'S local art world-wide folk art ecclectic gifts in the Western Plaza next to Eddie McStiff 259-7265 is necessary, personally. Adair: I made an earlier statement and it hasn’t changed that much. I said I wasn’t for it in its present form in that the county would have to pay for it. If they could get funding for it somewhere else, get the oil companies or the state, I found that at least half the people in my district would be for it. They didn’t want Grand County to have to pay for it. More than anything, there was talk that the money could be used for the hospital or something else that had an immediate need. I was for that, hands down. As for the right of way, perhaps we need to pursue that, particularly if the survey costs have already been incurred. And I asked Gene Nodine how long the right of way lasts, and he really didn’t give me a straight answer on that. He said he didn’t know how long. He said that maybe if we didn’t do anything after X number of years, it might disappear. Zephyr: You would support obtaining the right of way, but you wouldn’t want them to pursue getting funds to start construction? Adair: Right. Unless they got someone else to pay for it. Ken: The way the road board explained it, if they got the right of way, they'd have to go to the commissioners for approval to continue on with the project. Ken Ballantyne and Adair White Zephyr: Would you ttol th board and admini on there if you were elected? Adair: I don’t think, according. to the plan that we're allowed to do anything for 6 months. I should re-read that, I think that’s written into the plan, at least for the county people. And I would assume that’s also true for the board. Ken: I would hate to see us go in and revamp everything. There’s a lot of expertise out there. We need to go in and see what we can utilize and if it doesn’t fit with the goals of the council, it will have to sit down and decide which direction we go now. Zephyr: Moving on to the hospital. There are some who want to expand the services at the hospital; others would like to see it turned back to more of a clinic. What direction do you think the hospital should go? Ken: I’m personally against the idea of downsizing our hospital. If we want this community to grow, we have to be able to provide medical services. I worked though the ambulance association for 7 years. Where the funding comes from, that’s something that will have to be looked into. I would like to see them provide the services so that we don’t have to go to Grand Jct. or Salt Lake. Adair: I’m not for down-grading the hospital either. We had a son that had an emergency appendectomy at 3 o’clock in the morning. At senior citizens, they were talking about expanding extended care, but some of the candidates were going even further, seeming to indicate that the county should be involved in a nursing-type home and even apartments. I don’t see the county doing that. A couple years ago, there were some good tax write-offs to build nursing homes. I see private enterprise coming in and wanting to do things like this. Zephyr: Let me ask you about tourism. We seem to have been discovered by the world; the question is, how much more does Moab need to be promoted, and what are the impacts of tourism that the county council could really have an effect on? Ken: In Grand County, only 3% of the land is privately owned, so only 3% is generating funds to provide services to the other 97%. I’m not sure how the county can get involved or should be involved. The trick is, how can we extrapolate the assistance of those that are coming to this area "If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost." Aristotle |