Wednesday was a very blustery day in Coos County with Commissioner Kevin Stufflebean threatening to sue reporter Meghan Walsh and The World for ‘lack of credibility’. During a Board of Commissioners meeting Phil Thompson, active in the recall effort to oust Stufflebean last May said an article pointing out the glaring discrepancy between fact and Kevin’s pubic statements regarding his bankruptcy helped affirm the reasons behind the recall. Namely, the commissioner may bend facts and distort truth.
The commissioner advised his television audience and those present he was filing suit against the paper and Meghan Walsh personally for unspecified errors in their reporting. In my humble opinion this was more knee jerk, face saving posturing and I imagine it is very unlikely any lawyer would risk their license to file such a suit. Then an obvious plant stood up and said how wonderful it was that Nikki Whitty and former commissioner, John Griffith and Kevin Stufflebean had the courage to layoff personnel. I wonder if the family of Dean Caudle who died when the reduced road crew didn’t barricade a flooded road last spring feel the same way.
My hope is that Meghan Walsh and The World will investigate how the spreadsheets reflecting the budget figures used to justify the layoff of the road crew showed only $3.5M in January and over $5M during budget work sessions two months later. Were those figures cooked to deliberately deceive the public? That is a very fair question and if the answer is yes a severe ethics violation.
