<figure id="attachment_3349" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3349" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.the-chesapeake.com//wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Commissioner-Larry-Jarboe-on-Puff-Barthleme.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-3349" alt="St. Mary's Commissioner Larry Jarboe was the first to jump on the Barthelme campaign bandwagon, playing on the Veterans Day float. Jarboe is now running for the Maryland State Senate. " src="https://www.the-chesapeake.com//wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Commissioner-Larry-Jarboe-on-Puff-Barthleme-300x200.jpg" width="300" height="200" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-3349" class="wp-caption-text">St. Mary&#8217;s Commissioner Larry Jarboe was the first to jump on the Barthelme campaign bandwagon, playing on the Veterans Day float. Jarboe is now running for the Maryland State Senate.</figcaption></figure>
<p>To the Editor:<br />
In a recent interview with a local media, I was asked by a reporter if I would pay for balancing the budget on the backs of our schools. He had asked me if, as your Delegate, if I would support a tax increase to fund a state budget. Of course I told him no. That is when he asked me how I would fund a budget.<br />
I told him that I would find fat in the enormous state budget and call on constituents who balance family, farm and small business budgets to advise me on how to save and cut state spending. After all, the real heroes of our struggling national economy are you, your spouses, your friends, family and neighbors, the people who get up every day and make ends meet. This is what government needs to start doing, to face realities instead of spending every day in a fantasyland experience of endless tax hikes and irresponsible spending.<br />
The State of Maryland recently spent over $200 million on its health care website. When they got through with it, they proved their incompetence when it bombed and now they have had to turn to Connecticut to show them how to fix it.<br />
One has to wonder how many people could have been given health care with that $200 million.<br />
All of the conversation that I had with the media interviewer about taxes, spending and transportation is further explained in my platform on my website.<br />
I have also talked about the “baggage” of my opponents, that one of them has too much baggage and the other only recently moved his baggage here from Charles County in order to run for office in St. Mary’s. It has come to my attention that one opponent has proclaimed his past support of transportation spending but in the term as a county commissioner, he opposed a second span over the Patuxent River at Solomon’s and opposed the efforts of Commissioner Larry Jarboe to bring commuter and light rail into Southern Maryland. My opponent’s promises in this campaign don’t match up to his words issued in the past.<br />
We don’t always have to make a choice between fiscal sanity and funding our transportation, public safety and public schools. I will work to maintain all three in a manner that meets the needs of our county and at the same time find plenty of ways to cut frivolous spending in order to pay for what we really need.<br />
Thanks for your time and I hope you will consider supporting my effort to be your Delegate.<br />
Bryan “Puff” Barthelme<br />
Mechanicsville, Maryland<br />
LetPuffDoIt.com<br />
<em><strong>This email was received on Sunday, April 20, 2014 from Bryan Puff Barthelme</strong></em>: &#8221; I am not going to use the light rail in my platform. There are too many negatives about it out there and I don&#8217;t believe in it myself.&#8221;</p>