Ed. Note: Below is the transcript of the interview with Dawn Varney. She is a candidate for the district 1 seat on the Reno County Commission.
Marc Jacobs: So, tell me a little bit about Dawn Varney. Tell me who she is, where she comes from, and why you want to run for office.
Dawn Varney: Dawn Varney was born in Hutchinson. I lived on a farm 14 miles west of town until I was eight and a half. About that time, our family started moving all over the country. I've lived everywhere except the southeast, and that was primarily due to my handicapped brother's health. And number of years ago, in 1993, God brought my mom and brother and me back here to Hutchinson. I had always loved Kansas, always wanted to come back. Never thought it would happen, but I came back as the director of nuclear medicine at the Hutchinson Hospital, as it was called back then, and I've been the same place ever since December of 1993.
Marc Jacobs: All right, so I'll shoot the first question off to you. The county commission sets policy, and they adopt the budget and general direction of the policy. What do you believe is your role as a county commissioner towards those goals?
Dawn Varney: I'm a firm believer that government should be limited. There are tasks that the county commissioners should do. They've got to set the budget. I think that we need to look at every expenditure and eliminate waste and duplication. We've got to take care of our first responders, our roads, our infrastructure. We've got to provide the safety for the community. But it's not our job to support specific For-profit organizations, so I want to really focus on what the task of the county commissioners is, and do very well at that, and not extend beyond that.
Marc Jacobs: I'm going to take a little bit of closer look at quote the Reno County budget because the county budget has a lot of mandates that come down from Topeka and then there's a lot of expenses that come forward because of like labor and things like that. What would your priorities be in setting the county budget? What kind of programs would you cut? What kind of programs do you think are more important?
Dawn Varney: We absolutely have to fund what is mandated. There's no way we can get out of that. There are places where I believe that we can more efficiently streamline. If there are duplications, we need to find those and eliminate or combine. There are some things that we have funded in the past that I would have voted no on. It's not our position to be providing a lot of tax cuts, when the people here in Reno County are paying every single dollar that the Reno County Commissioners spend, that comes from the taxpayers, and we need to keep that in mind.
Marc Jacobs: I'm going to jump to this one because I want to make sure that that gets thrown in there because this has been a hot button topic for the last six to 12 months, and it's a hot button topic across the state of Kansas. But you know, the county commission brought it up. They had a special meeting. They had the special meeting in the basement of the courthouse instead of the regular commission meeting. But what is your feelings on data centers and battery energy storage systems.
Dawn Varney: I'm a scientist. I'm not a business person, but I have a background in research. My specialties in medicine were first nuclear medicine, and then in psychiatry. So I have a lot of empathy for people. I understand that 70% of the people nationwide do not want data centers in their backyards. My primary concern about them is the infrasound. Infrasound is wavelengths that we can't hear. It's below our auditory threshold, and it's considered below 20 hertz. The wavelength of intrasound is really long, so it will not be blunted or attenuated very easily. Trees aren't going to do it. It will travel for miles. It has. Of impact on people's health, on wildlife. We don't even know all the things that intrasound does. We do know, for instance, that intrasound above 100 decibels will affect cardiac function within an hour. People are going to get sick, and they're not even going to know why because they can't hear it. So I am against data centers. I would vote for at least a moratorium, if not an outright ban.
Marc Jacobs: I want to talk a little bit about job incentives and attracting businesses to the community to the county because I know there's a lot of debate on how much tax dollars should be spent on luring those in. What kind of incentives that we are giving them? Are we giving away too much to promote business for say a business that comes in and they only have 10 or 15 jobs. Are we spending way too much to attract jobs to the county?
Dawn Varney: I believe yes, we are spending way too much. In fact, I think any money spent by the county commissioner is too much. We have wonderful organizations here. The chamber of commerce does a great job. We have a great county. We have a lot of reasons for businesses to come, and for families to make their homes and grow here and stay here. Again, as I said before, we have to remember that every single dollar that the county commission spends is your money; it's not ours, per se. So I think a lot of these things, including luring jobs to the area, are best left to the community and to the organizations that are already prepared to show companies what the incentives are. This is a great place to live. It's going to become better, but it's not, in my view, the county commissioner's job to be funding jobs to come in.
Marc Jacobs: So, this one kind of goes in hand in hand with that one because we talk about jobs, and of course, if you're bringing people into town, they have to have housing. What's your feeling on providing, say, incentives or tax breaks to developers to develop homes to for potential residents to move in or current residents that are in a situation where they just need larger housing and maybe even more affordable housing. So, what what are your thoughts on that?
Dawn Varney: I think we actually have a lot of housing here. I think we have housing that can be upgraded. I think codes probably need to be enforced to a greater degree when it comes to developers that are building houses, we've got situations even right now where there's issues about funding pump stations and the like, where eventually the county is going to end up spending that, and they're not really going to get anything back. We have wonderful old homes. We have a lot of newer homes, but when it comes to new development, that is commerce. I believe that businesses should be able to make it on their own without the taxpayer money.
Marc Jacobs: We look at you know you look at you know housing, the big three the housing, jobs, and because of the housing and jobs, you look at childcare. The county had invested a lot of ARPA funds into childcare programs and healthcare programs that that money is now going away, and they had kicked around a thought of creating a sales tax to help pick up the shortfall from losing those funds. What are your thoughts on a potential sales tax to help recover or recoup for just those things: healthcare, health, healthcare, housing, childcare.
Dawn Varney: When we get grant money and extra funds from outside, that is a boon. It's a real blessing to us. I don't think that we should be feeling like any time that we get extra. Money that then we should be forced to continue whatever programs we put in place. We have childcare businesses in town. I think a lot more can come into play. So to add a sales tax just to provide childcare? No, that's not the function of the Reno County Commissioners, in my opinion.
Marc Jacobs: I think that you know there's a lot of things that can be kicked around, and I know that one of the big issues is property tax values and increasing assessments and that, and it's kind of driven both. Is the cost of replacing the items drives the assessment up, and then of course the assessment drives up the tax, the property tax value. Is this more of a local issue or is this a statewide issue? And if it's a local issue, what do you think the solution to it is?
Dawn Varney: That's a great question. I think it's from what I'm hearing, it's really a statewide issue. Yes, I experienced it myself, where my own home just keeps going up in value, and my property taxes have just skyrocketed. I'm on social security, as are many people, which is basically fixed income. I'm pretty fortunate, but there are a lot of other people who are being taxed out of their homes, and a lot of that problem comes from that appraisal of the property value. If the mill value, if the mill rate stays the same, and your appraisal goes up, you're stuck, and you have to appeal. And that's not that's not a pretty process to go through. So I think we need to work on making real assessments of our property values.
Marc Jacobs: All right, Dawn. I appreciate your time this morning. Any last words?
Dawn Varney: Thank you very much for inviting me here. Again, I'm Dawn Varney. I have a Facebook page if you want to follow and find out what I believe on other things. That's Dawn Varney for Reno County Commissioner on Facebook. I hope that people really look at who the candidates are and what the issues are, and that they come out and vote on august 4.
All right, thank you. We've been talking with Dawn Varney. She is the first candidate for the first district seat on the Reno County Commission. We'll be back with more BW News right after this. This is KW BW Hutchinson, Kansas.