The following Letter to the Editor is from the July 2024 issue of The Lenawee Voice. Letters should be 350 words or fewer and may be emailed to [email protected]. If space is limited, preference will be given to local authors and local topics. Please include your town of residence and a phone number for verification.

County needs to stop playing games with our money

Did you know that in 2021 the county paid $2,322,714 for the old Tecumseh Products site but just a couple years later it only appraised at $440,000?

We need to vote people into office that have a better grasp of how to spend our hard earned tax dollars. I have bought homes in the past, but I always had an appraisal done by the bank. Why wasn’t an appraisal done before money exchanged hands? Now the county has not only been saddled with a 50-acre piece of property, but no tax revenue or jobs have come to fruition during this time. Now the contaminated parcel needs to be cleaned up, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, before we can even start to do anything with it. Not only that but the county commissioners did not sell the property to a gentleman that was very interested that is local to Tecumseh.  We’re going to take a loss on this no matter what we do with it. Imagine what the county could have done with the $1,882,714 that was wasted on the purchase of this property. This was the Phoenix project. 

Who voted for this? County Commissioners Bales, Bolton, Collins, Tillotson and Stimpson. Now most recently a motion not to sell the property for industrial use was voted for by County Commissioners Bales, Bolton, Collins, Tillotson and Stimpson. We need to vote new people in office, not the same people that made this huge error. Our money is not to be played with like a Monopoly game.  

—  Ileana Chandler, Dover Twp.