Dear editor,
The City of Iola needs to fill an $800,000 hole they have dug in their budget.
Based on a $30 million city budget this would be 2.6 percent of their budget. If you take this percentage and apply it to the $15 billion budget of the State of Kansas, this would mean the state would have to fill a $390,000,000 budget shortfall.
The Iola Register has been blasting Governor Brownback saying his experiment has failed and yet not one word has been written by the Register about a budget shortfall right here in our little town that is 100 times larger than what the state is dealing with.
When is the city council, the city administrator and the Iola Register going to bring this up with the citizens and Council of Iola?
Their experiment that started years ago, by robbing all our bank accounts and all our department funds has not worked.
It is time for everyone to step up and put a stop to this cancerous spending that is eating our city from the inside out. This can not be sustained.
The 120-plus city employees we have is just craziness.
I work in towns with comparable populations to Iola in seven states, and I ask every city administrator what their budget is and how many employees they have. I swear the closest anyone came to having as many employees was Sidney, Neb. They had 71.
It is extremely rare that any of them have a full time fire department.
And while I’m at it, I am sick and tired of hearing that we have the lowest utility rates. This is an absolute falsehood. You all have been saying it so long you think it’s a fact.
Last week our council members spent over an hour of their time trying to decide whether or not to keep a 21-year-old smoking law that they themselves will not punish anyone who goes against it. That is the craziest waste of time I’ve ever heard.
Look at the small businesses that have shut down for whatever reason and the ones that are getting ready to. No one is coming in to replace these stores.
It’s also crazy that we keep building things so the people coming to Iola will have a place to live and yet we’re losing population faster than the U.S. Census can keep up with.
You people better wake up. You don’t have much more time. The next wave of monetary increases that I feel are coming from the City of Iola is about to put this little town out of business.
