The citizens had a right to be angry at the special called meeting on reapportionment. I had asked the other commissioners to seriously begin the process of reapportionment a while back as part of the discussion on the NAACP lawsuit and a majority said “no.”
We now have a new suspect five-district system that was literally flown under the radar, avoiding public exposure and, to the greater extent, eluding public debate. Tossing up the winning Frady-Horgan-Hearn map a handful of days before the vote was unconscionable.
Most, if not all, counties in the metro area have spent months revealing possible reapportionment maps, including long periods of public dialog. Our citizens did not even have a full week.
In the event that those five districts become part of a “district voting” system, we are going to have an enormous amount of angry citizens across the county because of the disjointed layout.
In connection to the incredibly brief period of time to discuss reapportionment, we also did not have sufficient time to discuss the opportunity to create a system where we elect the chairman instead of having the commissioners make the selection.
With our two most recent chairmen, one voted us into a regional mass transit plan and the other voted in favor of locking us into a regional transportation plan that includes additional sales taxes with over 50 percent of the funding going to mass transit.
The decisions made at the regional level from now on are huge and we had better have the people’s choice casting the votes.
Steve Brown
Fayette County Board of Commissioners, Post 4
Peachtree City, Ga.
