Custer County Chronicle

Inserted into this week’s issue, you will find our annual “The Best Of” special edition, which as the name would suggest, presents to you “The Best” things that happened in both Custer and Hill City last year. One caveat is that there are a few entries that weren’t necessarily one of the best things that happened, but were so significant they should definitely be mentioned.

Hey, did you know 2024 is a presidential election year? Just kidding. We know you know it’s an election year. How could you not? It’s everywhere.
Election years have become so angry, so divisive, so off-putting. We aren’t looking forward to it at all. It will really start to ratchet up in May as we head to primary season, when all of the Republican candidates will attack each other and call each names like toddlers on the playground, only to all fall in line once the election is over, like nothing ever happened.
Then will come the fall.

And we thought last year was a no-brainer for our Citizen of the Year.
Well, yes, it was last year too. Marty and Jen Mechaley were the easy choice for the Custer County Chronicle Citizens of the year for 2022 for all of the work they did in helping daughters (and a niece) of Warren Jeffs escaping the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and move on to productive lives. You all know the story by now.

Some news that we find rather disturbing originated out of Salina, Kansas, this week (what is it with Kansas and newspaper news in 2023?) when the City of Salina decided to use its own website to publish legal notices beginning with the new year. This move comes after the city commission Monday adopted a resolution to designate the city’s website as the official city “newspaper.”