I’m not sure that Alan Richardson, as a retired person from a successful career and with a nice residence on the river as his adopted community retirement home, understands the pain that our working population is going through right now. The April unemployment data showed that at least 21.7 percent of our 13,899 local workers were out of work and filing for unemployment insurance in April. And I say at least because I understand that many people have been trying to file for months and have not heard anything from the state yet, much less received any unemployment funds.
I asked the County Commissioners on March 17th to use county resources to help citizens apply for unemployment insurance, as I could see how such a crush of applicants would swamp the system. New claims at the rate of 2,500 to 8,000 per week every week have been officially filed by Idahoans in the month of May. As well, many of our Blaine County citizens are small-business owners who have had no or little income for three months.
I have been working hard to get information out to these business owners that there are SBA loans, Idaho state grant funds, and crowd-funded Kiva.org loans with zero interest. But, there again, many have not received their loans, or only received reimbursement for a small portion of their expenses. Who knows when any ‘normal’ level of business can come back.
So many of our neighbors are experiencing unbelievable fear, uncertainty and anxiety about how they are going to survive. I think Alan is being a bit tone-deaf to his co-citizens in advocating to spend more of the county’s limited funds on additional outside attorneys during an economic crisis that has decimated our recreational/visitor economy. The county already spends almost 9 percent of its budget on its legal department. That should be more than enough. Let’s spend our limited county resources to help our citizens get through this crisis.
Kiki Tidwell
Blaine County