Source: CVDaily Feed
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Outgoing Cache County Executive Lynn Lemon said he is sorry the county’s failure to follow state and county codes in collection and abatement of taxes went on for so long. He said it is evident that an adequate job was not done in training employees about the code responsibilities.
On KVNU’s For the People program Monday, Lemon said there should have been more oversight.
“I’m not trying to excuse but think about this, if you’ve done a practice for a long time and nobody has ever said ‘you can’t do that,’ and you learned it from your predecessor,” Lemon explained, “and you continue to do it and you were asked by others to do it, you get the idea that it is acceptable. We have got to fix it and we are going to fix it.”
Lemon said it is a good time for changes to be made because a new executive, a new treasurer and a new auditor will all be in office the first of the year. Councilmember Craig Buttars has been elected County Executive, Craig McCallister is the Treasurer-elect and the office of auditor has been combined with County Clerk with Jill Zollinger holding both positions.
Many of those positions were held by the same people for decades but now there will be changes on January 1, 2015. Part of the reason for such long-tenured political positions may be low voter turnout. Lemon said he is hopeful that changing from ballot box to mail-in voting will mean more people vote in this year’s November general election.
Lemon said when only seven or eight percent of the registered voters participate you don’t actually know what the people want.
“A number of our primary elections were our general elections because they don’t have an opponent in November,” Lemon said. “So, to me, they were critical elections where we should have had 40% or 50% or 60% voter turnout.”
Several other counties in Utah, Lemon continued, have tried mail-in voting and found it to be successful.