As of May 22, there are 3,342 homes in default, 1,645 Sheriff’s sales, 3,066 bank-owned for a total of 8,053 (

Realty Trac.Com is the source). That is more than 25 percent of the homes in Lehigh Acres.

With the ECWCD as one of the worst offenders of a bloated bureaucracy, and not even interested in paying attention to all the hungry people in financial distress they spent themselves into debt for the last three years as least and now that the banks will not give them a loan, they face a $1.2 million debt and want to raise our taxes by 11.3 percent to pay for the mess that extremely inadequate management and lack of oversight by the four board of supervisors. One of them is a certified accountant.

They have raised taxes 25 percent over the past three years.

They are a public agency, so they do not have to make a profit, just raise taxes; however, the people have no mony left to be collected, so maybe it is time to use the private sector solution.

And that is to change the management leadership.

A perfect analogy is likened to baseball, when a team is failing or has failed, change the manager and get a new manager.

The manager’s contract is up in August. His salary is $145,506.21 and that cost should be eliminated. It’s his leadership management that put us in this mess.

The assistant manager makes $129,986.55 and is an engineer and could take over in the interim when a new manager at a much lower pay and that position could also be eliminated together with the assistant to the assistant manager ($85,721.81) which is not needed at all.

That’s a half million dollars savings.

I served on that board and at that time, it only needed a part-time manager, half a day only, still the same 311 miles of canals to manage today.

In the past four years, they have gone from 25 to 33 plus employees with a staff of 10 to manage 23 workers in the field.

The top staff supervisors are paid a total of $600,000; talk about good ole boy job creation!)

Here are some suggestions to start the ball rolling toward streamlining our district to a new era of competent management.

Eliminate the assistant and assistant to the assistant’s job – total $216,708.36; start the manager’s position at $74,000 or less.

No public relations propaganda job – $78,406.06 saved.

Goodbye part-time accounting clerk and office helper – $35,976.26 saved.

No more both right of way technicians – $117,362.33 saved.

We have not looked into the contract employees positions due to the fact that the union business agent had asked an interview question of candidate Michael Welch – “If the tax revenue declines and you have to make all around cuts, how would you present it to the union members?”

Welch replied: “I would let the members decide if they wanted a shared all around pay cut or have some positions eliminated.” And the business agent said, “That is the right answer.”

However, the union agent has spoken before the board twice and has not mentioned this solution to the board, so we may at a later date offer cost cutting suggestions on on that side of the employment situation.

We have noticed that this extravagant spending proposals by the manager have surfaced since supervisor Jim Fleming died; however, the newly elected board supervisor or has taken over the reigns and has stepped into the role of watchdog and should get the public’s support.

Frank Lohlein, who once served on the board of the East County Water Control District, is president of CAIT, (Citizens Against Increased Taxes). He is a Lehigh Acres resident.