This past week was the tax and spend gala of the year. In case you missed the festivities, here’s a quick re-cap of how your local government is having an extravagant spending spree at our expense.
On Tuesday Fayetteville Mayor Ken Steele announced a new, never-before-heard-of program called the Fayette County Public-Private Transportation Program. Straight away, let me explain this uneconomical and inefficient plot to create more bureaucracy and waste more of our money.
Mayor Steele and his City Council tried to sneak an item on the Fayette County list of transportation projects going to the regional government for HB 277. It was a $17 million regional call center.
There were at least three public hearings of the county’s HB 277 list and a regional call center was never listed or mentioned. Commissioners Steve Brown and Allen McCarty put a stop to the sneak attack and Steele had to enter the project under Fayetteville’s name only.
Here’s what we get for $17 million. If a senior citizen or disabled person in Fayette County needs transportation, instead of calling Fayette Senior Services as they normally would do, they would now call the regional call center. Then the regional call center would call Fayette Senior Services. Wow! Mayor Steele has created a very expensive government middleman to make a phone call for us.
In case you don’t know, Fayette Senior Services has a flexible transportation system that includes a voucher program and a non-emergency medical transport program. Instead of allocating some regional money to help Fayette Senior Services buy some new vehicles and make other improvements to their wonderful program, Steele wants our money to go to a middleman at regional call center.
The description from the Atlanta Regional Commission describes the regional call center as “providing a fully integrated human service transportation system across the 10-county region.”
You guessed it, that means the center is connecting Fayette County to MARTA, GRTA Xpress bus system, Cobb County Transit and the proposed Clayton County Transit. We are going to be stuck as a funding partner to the mass transit systems all over metro Atlanta.
Back to Tuesday’s announcement of the Fayette County Public-Private Transportation Program: in addition to Steele’s marrying us to the regional call center, he also wants to raise our county taxes even higher to give more funding to Fayette Senior Services for the same trips that would have to go through the gobbledygook regional call center. The cost of that trip for a senior citizen is going to go through the roof.
Steele is also a supporter of the West Fayetteville Bypass, and Fayette County commissioners, on a 3 to 2 vote, decided on Thursday to waste another $3,405,810 of our taxes to keep building the road to nowhere.
You would think we are living in the Roaring Twenties the way these people want to throw our money around.
Ginga Smithfield
Fayetteville, Ga.
