Gordon Clay here. Thinking outside the box, here are a couple of ideas that should be able to easily generate the $5,000,000 needed to keep this county surviving and maybe even thriving.

Create a "Basic Charge" to live in beautiful Curry County. This is fashioned after the "Basic Charge" setup by Coos-Curry Electric. This would be a 25 dollar monthly fee per-resident paid to Curry County for the privilege to live here which would take care of all mandated services whether an individual citizen makes use of them or not.

A second opportunity is to set up a system similar to that on the Golden Gate bridge to enter San Francisco. There's no toll booth anymore so there's minimal delay. A photo is taken of each driver and their license plate. If they have a FastTrak account, it gets changed $5.00. If they don't they are sent a bill for $6.00. We might even be able to charge local businesses to put their coupon in with the bill.

We could set up the incoming gate near the Truck Check for people coming from California. If their car is registered in Oregon, there's no charge. Everyone else gets billed some amount - probably two-dollars but enough to cover the expense to maintain the service, collections, plus a profit margin

A couple of bucks isn't going to effect tourism and it would still be very cost efficient for people from Crescent City to shop and get gas in Brookings.

What do you think? If this doesn't work for you, please hold your negative comments and instead, give us a new and better idea that we haven't heard before on how to solve the deficit. Think outside the box.