In recent days the Sun-Gazette has published a letter to the editor and, on Monday, an op-ed column extolling the contributions of William Nichols Jr., the former city finance director convicted of misallocating tax dollars in May of 2025, to Williamsport.

Of course our goal remains to share a variety of differing viewpoints — no matter if we disagree with them or how strongly we disagree with them.

We ourselves have long understood and sympathized with concerns that money flows too freely from hard-working Americans to proposals and projects across the country without the proper oversight.

But we cannot pretend that the scrutiny and suspicion of how other communities spend federal and state grant money can be justified if we expect our own officials to be permitted to violate the requirements and stipulations of the grants Williamsport receives.

Without that scrutiny, our federal and state taxes disappear into an irresponsible black hole — into a debt that will hang over our children and grandchildren as communities pass their expenses onto an unaccountable “system” of always spending taxpayers’ money and never balancing the books.

Nichols’ defenders laud his accomplishments and contributions. We must ask, however — if the value of these projects is so crystal clear to merit ignoring Nichols’ deceptive skirting of oversight, why didn’t our city’s leaders believe their constituents would be willing to pay a higher millage rate or other burdensome municipal taxes to finance them in the first place? Why didn’t our lawmakers — state or federal — create grant programs under which the projects would have met the requirements?

Instead, Nichols paid for these allegedly amazing projects through subterfuge, through reckless disregard of the safeguards on how your tax dollars are spent.

Further, as we observed in May, the allegations to which Nichols, at least in part, pleaded guilty included creating tax dollar-paid jobs that otherwise would not exist and did not need to exist to offer to friends and acquaintances — a point that flatly contradicts the absurd notion that he was motivated solely by altruistic concern for the city.

The defenses of Bill Nichols we have seen are soft-on-crime, deficit-exploding cynicism. Tax-paying Americans — including the hard-working families of Williamsport — deserve better.