Letter to the editor: Vote for Sue Marshall and Clark County

Posted

Sue Marshall is the best choice for Clark County Council District 5. Sue has been working hard managing her family farm and earnestly serving the citizens of rural Clark County for almost a decade — supporting and promoting local family farms, engaging others to join her in working on water quality and land use issues and bringing a balanced approach to those issues in a way that serves the public and enhances our quality of life.

For those of you new to the county, it just takes a quick Google search of her opponent to learn he would be bad news for the residents of Clark County and would be more than an impediment to the effective and efficient operation of our local government.

A short list of Benton’s liabilities include:

No. 1: As “Senator” Benton, he was number one in failing to show up for legislative votes. (He missed 649 votes between 2001 and 2016) 

No. 2: In exchange for pushing the agenda of a prior councilor, that councilor appointed him without a fair process to be the highly paid director of a department which Benton had no background or skill to oversee and now has contributed $4,000 to his current “crony” campaign

 No. 3: When he was subsequently fired, he became the lead plaintiff in Don Benton v. Clark County. 



Incredulously, he now claims that he looks forward to “collaboratively” working with others in government. However, such a claim is quickly undermined by a review of his own actions in government where he regularly engaged in boorish and deplorable behaviors toward his own Republican legislative colleagues. Also, he is threatening to upend the Home Rule Charter reforms that Clark County voters overwhelmingly approved. He wreaked havoc in the short time he served as a county employee and he would wreak further havoc if elected.

Contrast Mr. Benton’s rogue and bombastic acts with Ms. Marshall’s lifetime of public service during which she established a proven track record of bringing folks together and finding solutions to problems, and the choice for Sue to be your next councilor becomes clear. She does her homework to get to the bottom of issues and then works in a highly collaborative and bipartisan way to achieve the best for our citizens. We are lucky to have such a well-qualified candidate for whom to cast our votes.

For Don Benton, it is him versus Clark County. For Sue Marshall, it is Sue for Clark County. Please open your ballot, take a moment to reflect and then vote for Sue and Clark County.

David McDonald,

Ridgefield