Van Pratt for County Commissioner

After prayerful consideration and discussion with my family I have decided to run for the County Commissioner seat held by Mike Curry.

From what I know about Mike he's a nice guy but that can't be the only criteria for being county commissioner. For those of you that like Mike, I'm not running against his personality, I'm running against his record.

Mike has been a commissioner for over 10 years. The budget was and still is a mess in spite of the $2M+ additional annual revenue generated by the sales tax increase. Debt hasn't been paid off but rather spending has grown. The general revenue budget should have an annual carry-over of 25%. For years the county has basically has no carry-over. Things have got to change.

I am running to bring another conservative vote to the county commission so that we can begin the process of trimming the budget back down to size. It is going to take political courage to say no to the parade of people that continually ask for more. The residents of Clinton County have had to cut back. It's time the county government does too.

The company I work for was hit hard by the economic downturn a few years ago. A percentage of people had to be laid off and those of us that remained took a 5% pay cut. I lost friends in the reduction in force and of course the pay cut was hard to deal with but we made it through. Now, two to three years later the company is having a record breaking year. The point of this story is that cuts were difficult but necessary given the economic times. The cuts allowed the company to weather the storm and be poised for an astounding recovery. I believe the same thing can be true for Clinton County.