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Letter To The Editor: Focus On Property Tax Relief and Emergency Services

Jeremy Plank
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Letter To The Editor:

At tonight’s Wood River City council meeting, we will once again be considering Councilman Dettmers request to pursue additional professional services regarding items discussed at length in prior meetings. If Councilman Dettmers gets what he wants, this would mean adding thousands of dollars in professional services to the tens of thousands in legal costs Dettmers has already cost Wood River taxpayers.

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I suspect that hiring a forensic auditor is the path of least resistance for him. Taxpayer-funded lawyers aren’t telling him what he wants to hear.

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As I've said, Wood River is more transparent than ever before. Before I took office in 2021, all we had was a paper copy of the agenda posted on the glass door at city hall. Now we have live and video-recorded meetings.

Agendas, board packets, minutes, and a calendar of meetings are all posted online. Councilman Dettmers list of grievances do not rise to the level of a forensic audit. Except for the closed session minutes (and rightly so), all have been discussed at length in previous meetings.

We continue to give time to discussing Councilman Dettmers personal vendetta and taxpayers are paying tens of thousands in legal fees. Imagine what this money could have paid for. We could have purchased safety equipment for our firefighters and police officers. We could have added additional sidewalk repairs. Infrastructure improvements and property tax relief for our seniors should be on our agenda, not $1 transactions and typos on a TIF Agreement.

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