Am I the only one in Butler County who doesn’t understand why the county gives 2.935 mills of our tax money to Butler County Community College?

This year, we taxpayers will give BC3 $4.97 million.

Why, I ask.

Soon there will be a report on how BC3 got an award from the United Way for being a great contributor. I said once before, if I want to give to the United Way, I will — but not through my tax money.

Then we will read about the surplus money the college has.

I certainly hope the new county commissioners open the budget and look hard at it. Raises of 3-plus percent have been given to some county employees.

I suppose I could research how many senior citizens in the county got nothing in a Social Security raise this year — but we still pay taxes at the same rate everyone else does and to pay the raises of some people who probably didn’t earn a raise.

The county employees should get a cost-of-living increase along federal guidelines and not something they can expect every year.

I’ve been a critic of Jim Eckstein most of his four years in office, but I’d like to publicly thank Eckstein and county Controller Ben Holland for voting against the raises for the nonunion employees. Is it fair to penalize the nonunion employees with no raises this year when other employees got 3 percent? No, but it has to stop somewhere.

Every time I watch the commissioners meetings on Armstrong there’s a motion for new hires. Every meeting. What is up with always doing more hiring? There can’t be that many people each month retiring.

I thought the county would save lots of money after selling the Sunnyview Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The proceeds didn’t have time to get settled in an account before the commissioners had it spent. And there was to be lots of money saved when the Sunnyview employees weren’t going to be under the employment of Butler County anymore. Where did that money go?

The three new Commissioners are going to be in the spotlight and they have a big job ahead of them. They have a real mess to clean up. I wish them well and I hope they don’t disappoint us.