ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
There has been much uproar regarding the recent vacancies on the Seward County Commission, and multiple people are eligible for those vacancies.
Local citizen Mike Hale is one of the three candidates up for Tammy Sutherland-Abbott’s former seat, and he has a long history in the area.
“I've lived here since I was 2 years old. My parents were both teachers, and then later on, my father ended up being a county commissioner and the director of the vo-tech school,” Hale said. “I've been a teacher, I've been the owner of a Scuba Ventures for 31 years, and I've also worked in safety services, where I'm an OSHA safety instructor for companies too small to have a full time ATS guy, and also sell buildings out there, because in this world, you have to have more than one job to live. I've raised my children here and have grandchildren here as well.”
Hale added there are multiple factors that went into his decision to run for the vacancy.
“I've had some interest in it a while, and I've just seen so much in this town where representatives were representing their own beliefs instead of the people who put them in the office,” Hale said. “I go around town and people are complaining about this or that, and the biggest complaint was 'We didn't want X or Y, and they knew we didn't want that, and yet they went ahead and did it anyway.' And not just with the county, it's been happening with the city and school board and other governing entities. I think whoever ends up doing this needs to be someone that's going to represent their constituents and their desires and needs. I've been involved with lots of things. I teach at the college, and I do SCUBA classes at the college, and I used to teach at the vo-tech school, and I've been involved in multiple businesses. I come from a conservative background – even though my father was a Democrat, he was the most fiscally conservative person I ever met in my life, and I think there's been more spending done. Times are kind of tough right now, and it seems like the only ones who are spending a lot of money are with the government, and we need to rein that in a little bit.”
Hale said there are many facets of the county needing work.
“The biggest concern to me is we seem to be bleeding businesses, and we need to get more jobs in this town, especially jobs that are more technical and take more education to do. There's always a need for physical work, but with advances in technology, we're seeing robots replace people, and we need to somehow come up with jobs a robot can't do,” Hale said. “The other issue I've been hearing about all over town is the property tax issue, and I've had people tell me 'Well, I'm just going to sell my house and rent,' but all of that will increase too. There's no way to get out of the property tax issue, and I don't know what can be done with that. When my father was a county commissioner, he always said so much of our property tax is brought in by the oil and gas industry, and when the gas field died, everyone had to hold on to their hat in terms of property taxes going way up. Most of my safety business is oilfield – I have some at National Beef, but most of my education with safety is the cost of property tax on are the gas wells. If you have a gas well that's not producing hardly anything and it's being taxed more than it's making, so we're seeing the few gas wells we have being plugged because they've been overtaxed. Everybody's complaining about the taxes and there should be solutions to this, and that's what I'm hoping to bring about.”
Hale said he has also kept up with the conversation regarding taxes.
“I think what happened this fall was a surprise that was not good. That increase should have been spread out and there are some entities in the county that need to tighten their belts,” Hale said. “Everybody in town is having to tighten their belts right now, our economy is not the best with the gas and oil prices, the farmers have had a tough time. It's not a good time to build new buildings, and we need make some stuff last longer. I'm not sure what can be done, if anything, about this huge raise we had, but we sure need to curtail that. When we do have something like what happened this fall, we need to figure out a way to spread it out so the pain isn't so bad for people.”
Part of that conversation has also included the potential hiring of a Chief Financial Officer (CFO), which Hale said he has mixed feelings about.
“I don't know how I feel about a CFO. It seems like every time someone hires someone like that and puts them in, they just kind of start doing their own thing,” Hale said. “I've seen it backfire where they end up spending a whole lot of money on a salary and not getting what they paid for. I watched our hospital go from one of the stars in the area go downhill. My wife was a nurse out there and said she felt things really went downhill because of the CEO and watched multiple doctors leave. I'm a little apprehensive about having such a position. That may be the cure, but I don't know. If there's someone who comes in who has had success with other towns, growing them and counties, it might be a good solution, but I'd be very cautious about it.”
Should he be chosen, Hale said, he hopes to be a help to the community.
“Whoever gets this needs to listen to the people and be their representative. It's not my ideas, it's their ideas. I know there are going to be people who aren't going to be happy with some decisions, but that's a risk when you get in government,” Hale said. “I would want the input of the population. If there is more communication, there could be more explanation of why we had to do this. I've been in contact with a number of people, including current county commissioners and ex-county commissioners and from what I've heard from them, it's not as cut and dry as all the rumors that are going around. It's not going to be easy to straighten up some of the stuff I see wrong in this town, but I think with everybody on the same page, working together, we can do that.”
