ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
Multiple people are vying for the recent vacant spots on the Seward County Commission, including local Chris Linenbroker, who is looking to fill Presephoni Fuller’s former seat.
As Linenbroker tells it, he is no stranger to Liberal or Seward County.
“I've grown up here since I was born, went to McDermott Elementary School, then South Middle school, then I graduated from Liberal High School and spent some time at Seward County Community College,” Linenbroker said. “I did move away for about 15 years and explored the world a little bit, then I came back here, raised my kids here, spent four years on the Liberal City Commission, where there were some good times and bad times, just like any other position. I've also had multiple businesses in town and worked for a lot of different companies.”
After recent events, Linenbroker said there were multiple factors to consider before throwing his name in for contention.
“The biggest thing is, I've had so many people come to me and say 'We'd really like to see you in that position.' And I didn't quite call them right off the bat, because I wasn't sure I wanted to be in that mess,” Linenbroker said “It's going to be a long process to get us back on track – it's not going to be just jumping in the door and we're going to change taxes and everything's the way back to normal, it's going to be lots of legal processes and all of that work, and it's going to be multiple months of legal work just to get started. But ultimately, this is something I've done before with the city, and I enjoyed it. I enjoy listening to the people in the community, and I want to try and represent the best I can. There was a there was a question I saw that said either 'What prepares you to be a county commissioner?' or 'What qualifications do you have to be a commissioner?' And I know a lot of people say, 'I'm all qualified to do that job,' but I'm thinking there are no real qualifications to be a commissioner except for needing to be an honest person who wants to listen to the people. And it's tough because there are so many challenges and tasks you have to take on, and you're never going to make everybody happy. I guarantee if you gave everybody in Seward County free money, somebody would complain and said 'Where'd that money come from?’ and ‘How's it going to cost me later?' You can't make everybody happy, but you try to make as much as you can happy, and you try to work with the community and your other commissioners as a team to be professional.”
That professionalism among the county commissioners, Linenbroker said, will need some repairing.
“My biggest thing issue I've seen with the county commission is they're not professional. All these rumors have been going around when they're hosting their meetings, and the professional image of being a commissioner and being part of an entity representing Seward County is just not there,” Linenbroker said. “When you're sitting behind that desk, you want to promote a professional image. You want to be respectful to everybody that comes in. Whether it's the county administrator or the janitor who's walking through, you'd better be respectful to them as your employees and all the citizens around you. And lately, I've even heard of county commissioners not respecting other county commissioners, and it's frustrating how it seems like they can't get along. In that kind of role, you have to be able to get along and play ball, because you are one voice out of five, and all the other commissioners are in the same position you are.”
Linenbroker also shared some thoughts on the recent taxing situation.
“Honestly, taxes are not as big a topic for me compared to a lot of people, because I'm looking at how the persona of the commission has become so broken, so we need to work on getting that back together so we can focus. You can come up with ideas after ideas, but if you can't get two people to help you and vote with you, it's never going to go through. I would like to see taxes lowered – personally, I've had a problem with trying to figure out where I'm going to come with the money to pay my taxes. But in the same regards, it's not just the county, there are other entities that have been creeping up slowly too. Seward County has always been an expensive place to live tax-wise, and our biggest issue is we have Oklahoma, three miles away, where you can get a house down there and pay hardly anything for tax-wise. And a lot of people say that's one of the things we need to work out on our budget. We have to consider what do we have to provide, and what are we providing for people in Oklahoma? We need to sit down come up with what exactly the county can afford if we took all that mill levy off there and said 'This is what we had for last year's budget. What can we afford from that budget?' Then, we need to sit down with real work sessions, not with a whole bunch of people, but the directors of each department and talk about where the money's going.”
One way to potentially help with that, Linenbroker said, would be the hiring of a Chief Financial Officer (CFO).
“I think having a CFO is something we should look into. But at the same time, we need to get other things figured out as far as what we've got going on,” Linenbroker said. “There are departments and places where we're wasting money, and there are departments and places we need to just leave alone and basically say 'You're doing good right now, we don't need to focus on you.' We need to work on that for real and figure out can we cut back a little bit here or cut back a little there? What services do we HAVE to provide? What capacity do we need to provide for those services? What can the county afford? A CFO would help us get the numbers into line and straighten that up, but same time, we got to figure out where we're at first. There are so many ups and downs and downs and rumors and everything else, I don't think most the public even knows where we're at, and no one will fully know where we're at until the actual numbers come out.”
Linenbroker added commissioners should make themselves more open to the community.
“Commissioners also shouldn't be afraid to go one-on-one with some of the employees and become friendly with them. There are so many departments, and some of those employees might have better ideas than the department head,” Linenbroker said. “But I've heard there are employees don't want to talk to the commissioners because they get yelled at, or they won't get listened to. You've got to be a friendly person and have conversations with people because you might learn more than you think. From the outside looking in, people think it's a matter of the commission saying 'Let's just cut taxes' and calling it good, but when you get in the weeds, there might have to be some really outside thinking to come up with an idea to make things happen.”
Overall, Linenbroker said, he is not afraid of the hard work involved should he be elected.
“I'd like to see Seward County and Liberal become affordable, because that's how we can prosper. We can't have champagne on a beer budget, that's not the way to go about things,” Linenbroker said. “I've seen many situations where we always want all this stuff, but when it comes time to time to pay for it, we don't want to, so we've got to figure out where we can limit things a little bit. It's not going to be easy to straighten up some of the stuff I've seen going on, but I think if we get everybody on the same page and working together, we can.”
