To The Editor,

East County Water Control District Commissioner John Boardman has been crowned as the new tax and spend king of Lehigh Acres.

Boardman’s latest pronouncement at the August 17 meeting of wanting to set an assessment tax fee upon the people for five, sex or seven years so that he will not have to take any flack from the public every year when he has to raise taxes, (Mr. Boardman also predicts he will raise taxes next year also).

We know that through years of mismanagement the ECWCD is now in a deficit bind and do not know how to get out of it. Boardman does not seem to realize that supervisor Damon Shelor was voted out of office running against a candidate that did not even campaign and research showed that it was because he was the vote that raised taxes.

Mike Welch is the only one who steadfastly refuses to vote to increase taxes. He believes that the shortfalls can be eliminated by different management of the complete payroll and physical infrastructure of the operation of the district. There is no doubt that the runaway spending such as exorbitant salaries, self approved health insurance for the commissioners and their whole families paid without taxes, then ignoring the employees and

not sitting down to have a serious discussion with what the employees have to give up until it can be restored when the times get better (the employees

voted not to give up the contract negotiated 4 percent pay raise and have dared the management to lay off employees, believing that they are short of employees to cover all the jobs as of right now. They want taxes to be raised.

Boardman even wanted a job opening filled that would add to the already bloated payroll – Boardman was appointed to fill an empty seat and unfortunately the board did not look into and question his soaking the public policies while on the fire department board.

For instance when the fire board voted to have those people who were covered by insurance pay, he insisted on employing a collection agency to collect from those uninsured people that could not afford to pay and so went the free ambulance service down the tubes. Ralph Hemingway also voted to charge all, and Frank LaRosa was the only no vote who still puts the peoples interests first.

Thanks to Mike Welch who persuaded State Rep. Kreegel to stop the appointments scam and changed it to a peoples’ vote being taken to replace empty seats. With Commissioner Nate Stout leading the raise taxes issue and Boardman leading the vote to raise taxes even higher than stout proposed and Welch voting against raising taxes at all we now have a two to two stalemate and the next meeting of the ECWCD.

Due to the closed meetings the board is having and do to past behavior, the announcement of what they will do will come at last meeting before the budget

deadline so that the public has no time for input or suggestions that might help alleviate the mess they have gotten themselves into.

One last note is that due to the local commissioners both fire and water departments not paying

attention or even bothering to find out the disastrous financial situation that the people of Lehigh Acres is in.

Therefore it is in the voter’s mind that a complete change of commissioners must be taken in order to save Lehigh Acres from total disaster. It has already started with the election of Mike Welch in 2008 and will be completed in the election in 2012.

The coming audit by the State of Florida of the ECWCD should give the voter insight as to what went on and how the civil servants got us into such a financial mess as we are in to date.

Frank Lohlein

Lehigh Acres