Kevin advised me this weekend that he would not be issuing a statement regarding the recall before Wednesday

I have until Wednesday and spending time with my wife, son’s and
granddaughter.

Thanks

Fair enough, we can certainly respect that. Nevertheless he did find time to send out a request for support and donations to fight the recall

Dear Friends and Supporters:

We have a very serious issue on our hands. The Citizens for Fair and Open Government did obtain enough signatures to place on the ballot a recall for my Commissioner seat for Coos County.

This is a very special interest group who are serving their own needs only and have no credibility what so all. The group is being lead by Ex Coos County Roadmaster, Larry VanElsberg, who resigned as roadmaster in April 2007 because he could not handle the stress of budget reductions, and the anxiety of the budget cuts were to difficult for him to deal with. On top of that, he was very distraught after he asked the Board of Commissioners to remove 77 roads from the county maintenance list. his idea of budget cuts, was to reduce services to the taxpayers and make them pay if they wanted their road kept up. We hand a couple of hundred people show up and testify that the road department was not doing their job and was being mismanaged.

After he resigned I personally asked the board not to make any changes, but to allow us to look at the operation of the department and see where we could cut and see what is needed in order to be more efficient and accountable to the taxpayers. With this process we identified many areas of inefficiencies and things that had happened that were very questionable. The bottom line, the department had been mismanaged and adjustments had to be made. In addition, we are losing $1 million in revenue to operate the department and since the ex roadmaster had a department with staff only, we had to look at staffing reductions.

The commissioner’s have fully taken the public safety into consideration and that is why we restructured the department, so we would have money to fix and upgrades road, unlike the previous roadmaster, we have seen over $5 million dollars in road improvements in the last year in a half, only because of looking at necessities and looking to the future.

The Commissioners did make reductions in the road department, we discussed the issue in three different board meetings, even though the authority to deal with staffing is delegated to management we opted to hear it as a full board because the reaction to the reductions is just what we anticipated. Many people view government jobs as an entitlement, and not a privilege to serve the public.

I need your support, as well as county in seeing this effort to have me removed from office is put to rest. I am asking for your support in putting the message out to other friends and supporters to VOTE NO to Recall Stufflebean, and if you are able financially to send funds to:

Kevin Stufflebean
Campaign Account
P.O. Box 1480
Coos Bay, Oregon 97420

We need to rise above the special interest “nay sayers” and keep the county on track. We have brought incredible accountability to the county as well as integrity. We have to much riding on our future to be derailed at this point. We have to be accountable at the local level in order to have the credibility at the state and national level to secure additional funding.

We are encouraging as many people as possible to write letters to the public forums, and submit to:

The World

The Coquille Sentinel

The Koos News

The Myrtle Point Herald

Bandon Western World

We have made to much progress over the last two years to let them end it now. I ask that you act now, as the time period is short and the ballots will be mailed next week, so we need to get the message out to the public.

Please forward this message onto friends as well, so we can get the information out.

You can contact me at either this email address or by phone at: 541-297-3092.

Warm Regards;

Kevin Stufflebean

The above email was forwarded to me via one of the recipients and seems to indicate an interest on the part of the commissioner to put up a fight. Van Elsberg does not expect Stufflebean to resign but I guess we will all know on Wednesday.