Local elections are the closest

thing we have to a community conversation, and next Tuesday is the last

chance for voters in Peachtree City to have their say on what happens

in the next two years within their little 15,000-acre plot.

Four folks are offering their

services to the public in two runoff races for City Council, four individuals

who contend they have the wisdom, knowledge and skills to be our representatives.

My votes will go for the two

best equipped to act on our behalf:

For mayor: Steve Brown.

For Council: Murray Weed.

Now here's why I am not voting

for the opponents, Gary Rower and Carol Fritz:

They won't listen to you. Rower

and Fritz just don't listen very well. They exhibit a profound deafness

to the voice of the people. They seem to hear only what their handlers

spoon-feed them (in Rower's case) or what some "expert" tells

them (in Fritz's case).

Occasionally the people's clamor

rises to an un-ignorable level as it did in the West Village annexation

issue. In that case, Fritz and fellow annexation proponents got peevish,

angered that anyone would question the Olympian wisdom of jamming another

6,000 to 8,000 people into the city's traffic-choked west side.

Rower, on the other hand, wasn't

present (he has mostly been not present at many city government meetings

prior to his mayoral announcement) at the Council meeting in early 2000

when Brown pleaded with the members to adopt his proposed big-box limitation

ordinance or something like it.

So Rower in his flyers spouts

misinformation from his handlers that Councilwoman Annie McMenamin, not

Brown, came up with the big box rule.

Well, DUH. She was on Council;

Brown was not. She took Brown's idea and formalized it and introduced

it as an ordinance. Rower didn't even take the time to research the Council

minutes to discover his misinformation, as pointed out by columnist

Amy Riley on Page 4A.

It took an average working-guy

citizen, Steve Brown, not a member of council or city planning staff,

to come up with an ordinance that should have been thought up and passed

But there has not been much

original thinking on the city councils of the past 10 years just a lot

of scrambling, after-the-fact, stuttering reactions to situations that

should have been foreseen years ago.

Better legal advice and better

planning and some attentive thinkers on Council could have saved us citizens

a lot of grief.

Now, Fritz and Rower and their

establishment power structure criticize Brown and others who question

the dullards and the status quo as being "divisive."

You know, democracy real, grassroots,

American democracy tends to be messy, discomfiting, even divisive. Otherwise,

we would have a one-party system, not two or more.

And in Peachtree City for the

past couple of years, we have had an open display of pure American democracy

at work raising issues, questioning officials, demanding answers and refusing

to be bullied.

Fritz has been on the opposing

side of that display, not liking it and not liking the people who disagreed

with her.

And Rower seems bent on perpetuating

the same, old, tired, non-planning, reactive mode that the councils of

the past decade have employed the same good old boys, doing the same good

old boy things, and somehow expecting that our massive new problems will

be solved by everybody just getting along.

If Fritz and Rower and the

good-old-boy-power structure have their way, everybody will just shut

up and do what they're told, and think what they're told to think, and

stop making waves, and stop rocking the boat.

Well, I think otherwise.

It's way past time to rattle

some cages and shake some city officials out of a two-decade dependence

on the developers' largesse. It's time for Peachtree City to grow up,

stop talking about a "master plan" that was outdated and declared

bankrupt 30 years ago, and start solving some very practical, mature city

problems like roads and traffic.

Brown and Weed will provide

the fresh start, the fresh thinking and most of all the attentive listening

that we need.

That's why I'm voting for Steve

Brown for mayor and Murray Weed for city council.