Letter: Wanted word in question

Dear Editor,

Last Tuesday, the St. Croix County Board approved the following which will appear as an advisory referendum question on the Nov. 4 ballot: Should St. Croix County continue to operate a public nursing home if property tax dollars are needed to fund its operation?

Prior to the County Board’s vote on the resolution containing that question — and because county tax dollars alone are not the only source from which our nursing home’s operating revenue is derived — I introduced a motion, advocating a minor, but clarifying change in the wording of the advisory referendum question, so that it would then read:

Should St. Croix County continue to operate a public nursing home if property tax dollars are needed to PARTIALLY fund its operation?

Please note that the use of upper case letters to spell PARTIALLY is for emphasis in this letter-to-the-editor; in the actual revision which I proposed, the word “partially” was spelled with lowercase letters.

In truth, the funding for our nursing home does come from property tax dollars, but only in part. Other sources include: private pay (ca. 11 percent), Medicare (ca. 14.3 percent), Medicaid (ca. 41.9 percent), Intergovernmental Transfer Funds (ca. 6.4 percent) and miscellaneous fund raisers and other sources (3.7 percent).

I was saddened that some of those County Board members who represent the Hudson and North Hudson areas were the most outspoken against insertion of the word “partially” as a modifier for the word “fund.”

Your arguments were specious, at best, in that you masked what is really at stake here: a truthful representation of how our county nursing home is funded.

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