Bruce Mattare said he takes a businesslike approach to his role as a Kootenai County commissioner, one focused on metrics and results. 

“Everything can be put into numbers,” he said. “It’s a matter of having the fortitude and the understanding that it can be done.”

In Tuesday’s Republican primary election, Mattare will face challenger Steve Em in the race for county commissioner District 2. The winner will run unopposed in November. 

Mattare is seeking his second term on the Board of County Commissioners. Reflecting on his first term in a sit-down interview with The Press, Mattare pointed to three significant wins. 

He said the county has increased staffing in the sheriff’s office and reduced taxpayer funds spent on Citylink, proportionally increasing grant funding for the public transit system. Citylink’s most recent funding ask, he said, is a mere $2,500 from the county. 

The Community Development Department has significantly cut wait times for processing and issuing building permits and reduced staffing. 

“That’s what developing operational efficiency within an organization can do for taxpayers,” he said. “There’s lots of room for improvement. Three quarters of our budget is personnel driven, so anything we can do to accomplish more with the same or fewer staff is a savings to taxpayers.” 

If reelected, Mattare said he’ll prioritize creating policy for responsible growth. That includes determining the impact of growth on the county’s infrastructure. 

“What I want to do is create a comprehensive plan where we establish service level metrics,” he said. 

Building metrics like 911 response times and acceptable workloads for county prosecutors into the county’s comprehensive plan would help county leaders see the actual impact of new growth and give commissioners “legally defensible mechanisms” to say no to growth or slow it down. 

Mattare said his policies are focused on responsible growth and funding for public safety, which includes county law enforcement, prosecutors and the district court. 

He believes county departments should create metrics to determine their staffing needs and use those metrics to substantiate their funding requests to commissioners. 

One area where Mattare has recently pushed for numbers is with the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office. Between March and April, with KCSO poised to outspend its overtime budget months before the end of the fiscal year, mainly due to overtime worked at the jail, commissioners voted to increase the budget from $925,000 to $2.7 million for the fiscal year. 

While injecting the funds was necessary because the jail must be adequately staffed, Mattare said, that $1.7 million increase nearly consumed the $1.9 million that commissioners could take from a 3% tax increase. That could mean tough decisions for county leaders. 

“They’re at this fork where they’re going to have to start measuring what they’re doing so they can start managing their department or they’re going to have to make cuts, because the money’s not there,” he said.