Forum highlights Lind’s mayoral race

Lind residents gathered at Lind Senior Center on Wednesday, Sept. 25, for a candidate forum, highlighting the two mayoral candidates for the upcoming election. Lind Town Mayor incumbent Jamie Schmunk has announced her decision to run for reelection, while former mayor Larry Koch is running as the opposition.

Barbara DeVore coordinated the forum and former Lind resident, Keith Deaton, served as the moderator. The mayoral candidates were provided with three minutes to provide residents with an opening statement, before answering a variety of questions.

During the opening statements, Koch described his concern with the current budget and the increase in utility rates for Lind residents. After his three minute allotted time, Schmunk had an opportunity to complete her own opening statement while responding to Koch’s speech.

“As you know I’m running for the position of mayor of Lind and I’m sure many of you want to know why,” Koch said. “After I had people come and ask me to run for the position I started thinking about it, and then I started looking into the budget and studying that, and then I became very concerned about the town’s finances.

“At the end of 2012, the water and sewer were so far in the negative the town had to transfer $40,000 into the sewer and $45,000 into the water fund, all which came out of the current expense fund. At the beginning of this year, there wasn’t enough money in the sewer and water fund to pay one month’s bills,” Koch continued.

“These two funds also are supposed to be stand-alone: meaning your rates that you’re paying to the town are supposed to pay all the bills on those two funds,” Koch explained.

Koch concluded his opening statement describing the month-to-month rates and that the numbers he supplied did not include the grant money for the wastewater treatment plant or the costs associated with construction. Koch stressed the importance of residents realizing the grant funding came from over 10 years of hard work by former mayors, the Department of Ecology, the Department of Health and multiple other funding agencies.

Schmunk began her statement in response to Koch’s opening speech.

“How do you follow something like that? I’m Jamie Schmunk and I’ve been your mayor for the past four years and I want to thank you for that honor. I’ve worked very hard. And the picture that has been painted here is not factual. It’s very upsetting that somebody who was the mayor can skew numbers and skew the facts so terribly,” Schmunk said, pausing to regain her composure before continuing her speech.

“If any of you would like to come into the office and sit down and look over the budget with me, and talk about the reasons why we have had to raise the rates, the simple fact is that we have gotten a great funding offer for this new waste water treatment plant, yes because of the past and also because of the present. Your rates have gone up because we have to pay for that 10 percent of the waste water treatment plant.”

Schmunk continued on to describe the $3 million project and the nearly $300,000 grant the town received to help fund the project, before continuing on to discuss her responsibilities as mayor.

“I very much enjoy being the mayor of this town. It has been a huge learning experience. There’s so many things that a person would never have any reason to understand until you get into a position like this and there’s actually no training for it anywhere but actually doing the position. So I’ve become quite proficient in a lot of different areas that make me complete to help the town in all of our infrastructure issues,” Schmunk said. “This town is very old, and the infrastructure is falling apart. And yes we do need to go for grants and something those grants are attached to is a low interest loan, but that’s the way that funding agencies work.”

The candidates moved on to answer questions submitted by audience members before the forum. The questions posed to the candidates discussed the ongoing issue with dogs in the community, the decision to not allow chickens to be raised in town, the ongoing decline of the condition of town streets and goals for the candidates if elected into a position on the council.

When asked how the candidates planned to fix the declining streets, Koch responded the town needed to redo the low-budget roads, which were constructed when the sewer lines were installed. Koch stressed the importance of improving the streets and then being vigilant with continuous maintenance.

Schmuck agreed the streets needed to be improved, and the town is currently working towards grant money to improve Sixth Street, one of the worst streets in the town. With the high expenses involved with repaving and improving streets, Schmuck explained it is hard for the town to afford and they have to be conscientious of costs before completing projects.

Another question focused on what the candidates would do to help the town to continue to move forward. Schmunk’s response focused on the need to improve the infrastructure in the town in order to help advertise and promote the town. Koch hoped to increase the Chamber of Commerce’s outreach in the community and was interested in finding ways to have more residents move to the community to fill the many vacant houses in the town.

The candidates also had the opportunity to answer what they would do to help the Town of Lind, if elected into the mayor position.

“Well if reelected I will continue to do the same thing that I’ve been doing for the past four years which is pouring my heart out, trying to represent us in the best way possible, to try to get the best funding packages for our infrastructure that is going south, and continue to get our community taking some pride in itself,” Schmunk said.

“The only thing I can see to do is try to hold the rates down as much as you can, I think that the rates are getting out of hand, and trying to maintain a healthy budget,” said Koch.