County to hold special session in Clarkston

Finding Whitman County too distracting, county commissioners plan to have a strategic planning session in Clarkston for two days at the end of July.

The session will include all three commissioners, along with commissioners’ clerk Maribeth Becker, county administrator Gary Petrovich, finance administrator David Ledbetter and Public Works Engineer Mark Storey.

Commissioner Dean Kinzer said the $1,000 cost of the two-day session, scheduled for July 30-31, will come out of the general fund.

“We’ll be working from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. both days,” he said. The group will work mostly on the budget, he said. “We want to see if we can’t all come together.”

“When you change leadership, it’s good to see if you’re all on the same page,” Kinzer said.

The group will look at the county’s $50 million annual budget.

“We didn’t think the cost of the workshop would hurt the budget,” he said.

Kinzer said the commissioners also looked at sites in Oregon and also scouted locations to the north in Spokane.

“There were too many distractions in Spokane, so we thought Clarkston would have fewer distractions,” he said.

Janet Schmidt with WSU Extension will be the facilitator, Kinzer said. He doesn’t know if she will charge the county for the two-day session.

At the end of the workshop, Kinzer said he hopes the group has a mission statement and goals for the next few years, along with an efficiency and evaluation process to promote leaner government in all county departments.

“It’s like the old adage, ‘If you don’t have goals in mind, you have nothing,’” he said.