Editor,

I am wondering where Island County gets the enormous funding to pay the salaries of the 20 or so people and the line of county vehicles parked along Reservation Road to stand around and watch an excavator burst a new drainage pipe under the road?

In my 30 years of supervising construction projects I never saw this many people gawking and taking photos of a couple guys doing their job.

My initial thought was that this was a huge design team working on plans for some much-needed guard rails, then I realized what was really happening.

Utter waste!

Most of the citizens who pay the higher tax rate to live on the island expect that our county officials would be a little more frugal with our hard-earned tax dollars than the waste that I witnessed the last two days along the same area of Reservation Road.

Next time the county has a need for this or any other type of construction service, how about sending out an RFP to the local contractors to get the best-qualified bid and contract with them. That should reduce the amount of unnecessary county employees to one person, a county inspector, and save the taxpayers some major dough.

Fact: a professional contractor will perform tasks with a higher-quality standard, complete the project in less time, leave the roads clean because this is what they do each and every day, not occasionally, and they actively use best management practices plus the county will have a firm fixed price without any overtime or extra costs that county officials may have missed while doing this work in house.

Also, bring the road sweeper out because you have a muddy mess in the road you failed to clean up to prevent incurring additional costs associated with DOE fines for not following state ecology guidelines.

John Hodges

Oak Harbor