Adams County Commissioner District 2

"This is my fourth year (as a commissioner,)" Weise said. "I've worked for the county since 1990. I started out as a deputy sheriff. I was the under sheriff for seven years, five years, I can't remember for sure because that's a long time ago. I went back to being a deputy for a period of time, but because I had worked in emergency management when I was the under sheriff, and the situation at the time was that we needed somebody with some knowledge about emergency management, when I went back to being the deputy, the current sheriff put me in the emergency management position. So I did both jobs for a little while and then I just transcended into the emergency management job and did that full time until I decided to run for commissioner.

"I just thought I would be a fairly good commissioner, because I knew a lot about what was going on in the county," Weise said.

"When you sit in a commissioner seat, you will be amazed by the amount of things you have the opportunity or are responsible to touch...," Weise said. "You're in charge of allocating what money comes into the county. You're also in charge of facilities. You have to do some policy."

Weise said working under the county's budget is at least a challenge.

"We're really getting to the tipping point that our revenues are not keeping up with the amount of service that we're expected to provide," he said.

"I don't want to go to the community and say we have to tag you more with the taxes," Weise said. "That's the last thing we want to do. And we're looking for every angle and possibility that we do not to do that, and we haven't got there yet, and this might sound like a lot, but wee have $3 million more expenses than we expect in revenues."

"Everybody does well in Adams County as far as property taxes," he said. "We talked with the treasurer and we probably get 98% of what's expected. In the State of Washington your taxes can only legally go up 1% plus new construction, so that limits the amount of revenue that local governments are getting. And we're paying people 3% more salaries. Luckily our operating expenses don't go up a lot, but we're paying more for fuel for the road department and for the sheriff's office, the ones that use a lot of vehicles. All that cost is skyrocketing."

"The only thing that keeps you compatible is new construction and that's always kind of helped out a lot, so it's been able to absorb some of those increases, but you can't hang your hat on that," he said.

Regarding his campaign, Weise said, "I put my signs out. I talked to a few folks, but my campaign was if you got any questions, I really hope that you would holler at me because there's a lot of claims that are out there that say that we're not doing this or we're not doing that, and I think you should get that from the horse's mouth on what exactly is happening."

Weise said the county was able to use COVID money to upgrade computer equipment and provide a more secure firewall.

Weise mentioned he is managing a county project for communications, "for fire ambulance and law. It's been an incredibly difficult project but our new HR person and I talk constantly. She's wanting to get this done quickly."

"I'm working on a project right now for the food bank that the USDA came out with some extra money... that will give us about $15,000 that we can funnel back into the local food banks. I'm working on so may different things," Weise said.

"As long as I've been here in Adams County it's been that we're big enough to do some things but we're not big enough to do (other) things'" he said. "Could the county use a finance director? Oh, absolutely. Could the county use an executive director? Oh, absolutely. Do we have the money or the ability to pay people to do that? We do not. So it falls back on the commissioners or the auditor."

Weise said the ballpark annual budget for Adams County is around $20 million.

His contact info is (509) 989-4730 or [email protected].