The Wahkiakum County Eagle - Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891

To The Eagle:

Vote no on school bonds, or you’ll be signing a blank check for unknown costs. The Eagle reports these improvements will cost ‘about’ $35.4M. Ever had a remodel done to your home with an ‘about’ estimate and it actually cost 50 percent more?

When you bought your home the bank charged you fees and a loan interest rate based on your credit. By the time you pay off your home you will have paid back more than double/triple the loan amount – same goes for a bond issue.

Our county does not have AAA credit rating – so our interest will be higher for this bond.

We may easily have to agree to an upfront $36M debt to get the needed $29M for this project. With interest over 22 years homeowner’s could easily be paying back over $72M!

Ask the county – who is our bond broker? What are his fees? What interest rate is going to be charged against our debt?

Some folks could easily be paying out more than $80,000 over this bond period. But that won’t apply to the assessor – while we have had our properties grossly over assessed this year our assessor managed to devalue his island waterfront property over 2 percent! (Assessor’s office figures available to the public).

This charge to our properties will hurt the elderly on fixed incomes the most.

Before we vote yes on this bond issue we need to have a public hearing at a neutral location and have these questions answered.

By the way – these fees/costs are real and only the tip of the iceberg as to what we’ll be charged before this is over – look at the city sewer fiasco!

David Newton

Cathlamet