Nielsen endorses Baxter for county auditor

County Commissioner Darcie Nielsen endorsed Sandy Baxter for county auditor on Friday — and knocked incumbent Si Stephens, alleging that he spends too much time out of the office and that he offered to “hide” an unauthorized expense from the state auditor.

Stephens denied both accusations.

Baxter, the county’s elections supervisor, faces her boss, Stephens, on the Nov. 5 ballot. Baxter is a Democrat, as is Nielsen. Stephens is a Republican.

“Sandy brought the elections office into the 21st century and she will do the same for the rest of the auditor's office,” Nielsen wrote.

“Sandy brings an incredible amount of energy, enthusiasm, honesty and integrity to her work, along with a high level of professionalism, technological know-how, and accounting savvy. These are all skills vitally important to the job of auditor. Regrettably, the incumbent is lacking in several of these key areas.

“Having been witness in the courthouse now for six years as county commissioner and six years before that as a county employee I know well the absenteeism, archaic technology and office systems, accounting blunders, and deliberate obfuscation of financial data delivered by the incumbent. And, even in this era of accounting scandals I was shocked that the incumbent, an elected official sworn to uphold the law, would offer to ‘hide it from the State Auditor’ as he suggested in an e-mail regarding an expense reimbursement. We do not need four more years of this sort of behavior.”

Stephens said the comment about the expense reimbursement was meant as a joke and was included at the end of an e-mail to Nielsen.

“I sent that as a joke to Darcie,” he said Friday. “The commissioners had taken our state legislators out for dinner as a show of appreciation and for some reason it ended up on Darcie’s personal credit card.” He said Lil Hamel of the commissioners’ office asked him if the bill could be reimbursed, and he told her no because taking someone to lunch is not an authorized expense.

“I recommended that perhaps Rhea (Miller) and John (Evans) could pay Darcie for their share (of lunch),” Stephens said. The “joke” about hiding the expense from the state auditor was in the last line of the e-mail. “It was meant clearly as a joke. It was not a statement that we were going to do it — (the lunches) were not a legal expense.”

Regarding his alleged absence from his office, Stephens said he works Thursdays on Lopez Island in his CPA office, but that 70 percent of his time is spent on county business.

“It’s a day when I get a chance to interact with constituents on day-to-day, personal stuff,” Stephens said. “We’ll handle licensing, do budget work, assist senior citizens.”

Stephens said his responsibilities as an executive committee member of the Washington County Risk Pool — which insures counties — takes him out of the office a total of two weeks a year.

Stephens said Nielsen is wrong in assuming the technology upgrade is easy.

“I put this system in as a consultant in the 1980s before I became auditor,” he said. “It needs to be upgraded, but the minimum cost is $600,000 and the maximum is $900,000. The dollars are so significant, that we have to decide whether we’re going to spend money on technology or on people.”

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