The absurdity of Fayette subsidizing the feds

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The majority of our Board of Commissioners, composed of Chairman Herb Frady, Commissioner Lee Hearn and Commissioner Robert Horgan, continue to astound us with their unbelievably poor decision-making abilities.

You’ve got the West Fayetteville Bypass, the appointment of relatives to oversee their re-election campaigns, an illegal meeting to take control of the Board of Elections, the vote to keep Fayette County in the regional mass transit plan and the rejection of the proposal to use HB 240 to save the 2012 budget. The list goes on and on.

Frady, Hearn and Horgan are now using a piece of county property for the federal Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program and using our county taxes to subsidize it. Commissioner Steve Brown and Commissioner Allen McCarty voted against the move.

In a blog comment on The Citizen website, Commissioner Brown said of the WIC program, “You are paying for the cost of services twice: federal taxes and county taxes.” He continued, “I have nothing against the WIC program offering, but I am totally against voluntarily subsidizing the federal government’s programs.”

Our county tax dollars are going to be offered up voluntarily for a federal government program we’re already funding in full through our federal taxes. Furthermore, we’ll see our local taxes used for the upkeep of the new trailer and the grounds forever.

Please keep in mind the majority of three are cutting recreation funds in the 2012 budget and they can’t fund the county vehicles that need to be replaced, but they have no problem using our funds to subsidize a federal government program that the feds should be taking responsibility for with our federal taxes.

Unfunded mandates are bad, but voluntarily handing over our money to the federal government is just plain crazy, especially when the county budget is crashing.

The latest unbelievably poor decision from Frady, Hearn and Horgan is their refusing to bid out services for private contractors providing services to the county.

Commissioner Brown pleaded with the other commissioners to bid out contracts for county service providers. Only Commissioner McCarty would vote with him.

It seems like plain old common sense to me that the county government needs to at least try to get a lower price on services. I just don’t get why the majority of Board of Commissioners think it’s a good idea to hand our money over to companies without a professional request for bid. It looks really, really bad.

It’s pretty easy to get the opinion something might be going on behind the scenes that’s not in the best interest of the taxpayers of Fayette County.

Chairman Frady, Commissioner Hearn and Commissioner Horgan, you’ll never win re-election, but for the sake of your constituents, please abandon the good old boy system and start bidding out service contracts worth millions of dollars and stop using our money to subsidize federal government programs. We don’t need “progressive” liberal politics in Fayette County.

David Barlow

Tyrone, Ga.