Well. I want to start by saying that I am not against people having a nice life — I have always believed in that, ask anyone — but when I heard that nine county offices will be closing on Fridays starting September 1st, I had to sit down with my coffee and really think about what I wanted to say, and what I want to say is: who exactly is this for. Because the people who actually live here, and I mean the ones who have been here long enough to remember when you could walk into the assessor's office on a Tuesday afternoon without scheduling anything in advance, those people have lives too, and some of those lives include needing a county office to be open on a Friday. I am not saying the employees do not deserve rest. I am saying I would like to know who was consulted before September through November got selected, because September is when things start happening around here, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
And while we are on the subject of decisions being made — I see the Planning Commission has two open seats for District 3, which is fine, that is how it works, letters of interest on a rolling basis, very good — but I will say that back when Harold Fenstermacher ran the Planning Commission, and this would have been sometime in the late eighties or possibly the early nineties, you knew who was on it because they showed up to things and people talked to them at the grocery store and there was an accountability to it that I am not going to say is entirely gone but I am also not going to say it is entirely present either. If you are in District 3 and you have time to write a letter and attend meetings, please do it, because the alternative is that someone else does it instead and then we all have to live with whatever happens next. I have seen that movie before.
Now I do want to mention — and this is only loosely related but it has been on my mind — the parking situation outside the county offices has been genuinely something else this spring, and I know I touched on this back in March but it has not improved, and there is a certain way that the spaces near the entrance seem to disappear between nine and eleven in the morning and I have my theories about why that is and I will simply leave it there. Back to the main point: the new Board of Commissioners leadership, Teresa Jenkins as Chair and Zack Trudell as Vice-Chair for 2026, those are newly elected folks and I will reserve further comment until I have seen what a full year looks like, which is only fair, and I have always been fair — but I will say that the 32-hour work week trial landing in the same season as two Planning Commission vacancies and a leadership transition is a lot of change happening in one corner of the calendar, and the people who actually live here and need things from their county government in the fall are going to notice all of it at once whether anyone planned for that or not.
That's all for this week. You know where to find me.