Lead thrower,

You asked;" Since you are not allowed to see the list, how do you know waste is going on?

I know that it's a hard to figure out, but haven't you ever asked yourself WHY is WDFW always having these short falls of funds each year?

How many times have you walked through their new building in Olympia and seen all those individual little office spots sitting empty with the best computers that our money can buy sitting emty and there is nobody at home? And please don't tell me that they are all out in the field or at meetings either. You don't really need to see THEIR list to add two and two together and come up with four!

It will be interesting to see how their audit comes out. But if it is like most audits that I have been involved in, or seen the state do, it will most likely be "laughable" to say the least!

This is truly a case of the fox guarding the hen's house. And guess which one is the fox! I can just see the summary findings now. State fines state in violation of wasting funds . . . yea right!

The entire audit will most likely do nothing but match receipts to their expenditures. A couple of years ago I wrote a 1000 page complaint to our states auditors' office concerning a payment that was authorized by one of our county commissioners to a friend. I even met with the head auditor officer to discuss all the issues that I had documented in my report.

She told me that I had done an excellent job of documenting the facts and that her office would get back to me when they had finished their findings. They were doing a complete audit of Lewis County. She said that it would be about a month before they could meet with the commissioner and confront him with the documents of my report. Well, I had heard that she had met with the commissioners and with their "legal staff" to discuss their findings. So after waiting for about two months with out hearing a single word back from her, I tried to contact her by phone. I got the run around from her staff for about two more weeks; she still would not return my calls. Finally, after demanding to find out what the status of my complaint was, I got a call from her assistant. I was told that her boss (the auditor that I had met with) was taking her last 2 weeks of vacation because she had given the state her notice that she was quitting her position, as an auditor, and was going to go to work for Lewis County.

Apparently she had cut herself a deal with the county commissioner who she was doing the conflict of interest complaint with and they (all three commissioners) created a brand new county position for her. They claimed that the county would supposedly not be doing these kind of thins again with her as an overseer. The states final audit report did find that the commissioner was in violation of state laws concerning the "conflict of Interest" issue but then decided that they would not prosecute him, and said that it would be up to the County Prosecutor Office to do that.

Well if you lived in Lewis County, you already knew what that outcome was! So the commissioner got his hand slapped; the x-auditor got the highest none elected paying job in the county; and we, the pepole, got screwed!

And the bad part about it all; it was all legal for them to do what they did.

So the next time that someone on our board accuses me of yelling "conspiracy" they better walk down the trail that I have already walked! So do I expect to see much come from the WDFW audit. . . Daaaaaaa!!

PS; I have a paper-documented trail to back up 100% of what I have said!



Cowlitzfisherman