To the editor:

Open letter to our sheriff:

The facts do not lie. This man has endlessly wasted our tax dollars, provided a level of work that would get one fired from Walmart and allowed our streets to become drug filled and some towns to descend into near horror shows. All while the only thing he has said for years is he need’s a bigger jail, to house more inmates from other counties… not our inmates. We are supposed to pay our tax dollars for another building to house other counties inmates. He wants a reward for the heroin and meth hole he has presided over in complete failure?

Mr. McLean: Jail overcrowding you say. We have a vote, we say no, you act like the vote never happened. Wash, rinse, repeat for years. As your office has focused only on this jail with blinders your county has become a sewer.

We are overcrowded because we are full of inmates from other counties. That sounds like their problem, not ours.

Parts of this county have become crime-filled wastelands. That wouldn’t be the case if anytime in the last multiple terms we had a sheriff interested in the law as opposed to one who thinks he is a politician. If you wanted to be a politician you should have run as one. And with the flood of drugs on the street and crime out of control it is the same line you have vomited up for over a decade.

You think if you did your job and got ahead of the actual crime, as you were elected to do, we might not be in this situation. Mr. McLean, you are a disgrace and every time you cash a check you steal from the local tax payers.

Even in your own party, nearly half voted to be done with you. You are a disgrace. You have been the most ineffective sheriff this county ever had.

As Mr. Lahti spent decades next door showing what a sheriff should be, you used it as a platform to get your name in the paper… crime, it’s not like we elected a cop. The statistics are clear. The county has gone straight down under your watch. You have had corruption in your own department under your own nose and are too occupied by your only concern to see it. You sir are simply pathetic and do not deserve that badge you disgrace every time you put it on.

Our tax dollars and resources should be going to make our county better, not to buy buckshot sandwiches and grape kool-aid in a tin cup for some drug dealer or pedophile two counties over. Your main concern has always been how to get our money to pay for someone else’s problem. You are the Houghton County Sheriff, sir. I repeat, Houghton County.