Good luck to new commissioner

It's finally official: Joe Brenneman is the next county commissioner.

We congratulate him, and wish him good luck as he starts on his arduous task.

As a farmer, of course, he knows enough to don a pair of work boots before he steps into the thick of it, so we are at least somewhat confident that he can anticipate what is coming.

First of all, there is obviously some rancor remaining from the recent very close election, which had to wait for a recount to be conducted before it was official. Brenneman benefited from a Republican crossover vote to make him the first Democrat elected as county commissioner since 1990.

But that crossover vote also left him with a very disgruntled group of Republican voters who feel that this election was somehow stolen from them. That's silly, of course. No one has a right to hold office without winning a majority of the votes, and Brenneman ran a mostly gentlemanly campaign that obviously impressed enough voters to put him over the top.

But division and disharmony are certainly part of what has become the norm in county politics for the past 10 years or so. It will be up to Brenneman to work within that context, and if he does so successfully then he will certainly win over more supporters as he tries to get things done.

The next six years will see Brenneman planting seeds that will help determine what the Flathead Valley will look like for the next 100 years.

There is no shortage of challenges facing him: funding problems, particularly in the sheriff's office and road department; growth in all corners of the county putting pressure on county services; additional pressures on county facilities themselves, and on and on.

That doesn't include the big one - planning for a county with a burgeoning population. The planning issues include subdivisions, water quality, housing density, road systems, open space, commercial development, city-county relations and that intangible "quality of life" that residents always point to when they question a particular project.

That list alone is enough to make one wonder why anyone would really want to be county commissioner.

But Brenneman doesn't have to handle all these issues alone. He apparently will have a good working relationship with Commissioner Gary Hall, a Republican, as he enters office.

Don't expect miracles or wholesale changes overnight, but those two commissioners could form a bipartisan basis for resolving some of the divisive issues that have plagued the county in recent years.

We hope that the viewpoint of departing Commissioner Howard Gipe (after 18 years on the board) holds true: "I don't see much difference between the Democratic and Republican county commissioners. They want to run the county as cheap as they can, and they want to do as good a job as they can with the money."