The June 9 meeting of the Fayette County Board of Commissioners was a successful launch of Fayette County into a new orbit of ludicrousness. Houston … can you hear us … we have a leadership problem!
There wasn’t an open seat in the auditorium. The crowd had come to support Commissioner Steve Brown’s effort to right our county’s financial ship. Many in the crowd got up and spoke in favor of Brown’s plan to use the new House Bill 240 solution for adverting a budget crisis in future years.
I wish I could say Brown gave an excellent presentation and that smarter minds prevailed and our county is now on the road to financial recovery. Unfortunately, the devastated crowd witnessed the worst case of political abuse of power they had ever seen.
We all watched the spineless holdovers from the previous shady Board of Commissioners (Chairman Herb Frady, Commissioner Robert Horgan and Commissioner Lee Hearn) massacre Commissioner Brown with dodging, stonewalling and insisting that Brown not be allowed to speak.
There is no doubt Commissioner Brown followed the county’s policy for filing an agenda item. Since the meeting, people have been circulating digital copies of his email request to be placed on the agenda and several other documents too.
Chairman Frady executed the hatchet job on Commissioner Brown starting with the pathetic lie they were “blind-sided” by Brown’s introduction of HB240, which allows the voters to have a referendum to use SPLOST funds to be used to save our budget disaster.
If the editor of this newspaper will allow me, here is exactly what Commissioner Brown requested be on the agenda way back on May 17, well before the cut-off for adding agenda items:
“I request the following appear on the Board of Commissioners meeting agenda on June 9, 2011: Reassess Transportation SPLOST projects in a difficult budgeting environment when governmental expenses are climbing and revenues continue to drop. The Transportation SPLOST projects have been discussed in previous meetings. Previous budgets have been passed without consideration of how to balance falling revenues and adequately sustain the government. We have now reached a point where select actions are necessary in order to prevent further raiding undesignated fund balances and increasing taxes. In moments like these, everything should be on the table for consideration, including the reassessment of Transportation SPLOST projects as a means of bolstering the budget.”
The request from Commissioner Brown is crystal clear to me. But just in case the three holdovers couldn’t comprehend what Commissioner Brown was saying, The Citizen had a two-inch bold headline on the front page of the June 8 edition that read, “Brown: Repurpose SPLOST funds” with “Shift of bypass money would rescue ‘unsustainable’ budget, commissioner says” beneath it.
Two days before The Citizen article, the Fayette County News ran an article entitled, “Commission will continue finance talk tomorrow.” That article said, “Brown said that at the June 9 meeting, he will present a proposal dealing with falling revenues by reassessing Transportation SPLOST projects such as the West Fayetteville Bypass.”
The article continued, “This past session, the Georgia General Assembly passed a bill allowing counties to transfer SPLOST funds from planned projects to other uses. Brown said he would like to see money pulled off the West Fayetteville Bypass project and used to prevent tax increases and the pulling of money from reserve funds.”
The reporter was reporting on what she heard from the Commissioners Workshop meeting on June 1 (Frady, Horgan and Hearn were there too!).
Anyone who said they didn’t know what Commissioner Brown was presenting at the June 9 meeting is lying. The real situation was we had three commissioners who were frightened to hear a valuable plan on what the county could do to avoid future financial disaster (a disaster the three holdovers helped create).
Frady, Horgan and Hearn were frightened because they know the 2012 budget and future budgets are in serious trouble but they can’t give up their support for the useless West Fayetteville Bypass even though citizen support for the Road to Nowhere is at rock bottom.
Commissioner Brown was asking for a committee to be formed that included Chairman Frady to discuss the HB240 option for repairing the budget without raising taxes but the others would not allow him to speak.
The three holdovers are willing to raise our taxes and run us into red ink in future years just to save a road no one wants. Their treatment of Commissioner Brown was deplorable.
Commissioner Brown and Commissioner Allen McCarty want the voters to decide on adjusting priorities and using available funds to keep the county’s finances from crashing, but Frady, Horgan and Hearn are fighting with all they’ve got to keep their pet road project away from some very disillusioned citizens .
You can watch their shameless mistreatment of Commissioner Brown on Youtube.com at www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qebdVdhwHI and www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiGDkloCa9Y.
David Barlow
Tyrone, Ga.
