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I attended my first-ever Board of Commissioners meeting Tuesday night, and by and large it seemed pretty routine – other than it felt like I was at a GOP meeting at the beginning, with a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. What I want to note about it though is the level of ‘higher’ government interference in local matters I witnessed first hand: Monday night, the Lee County School Board met and one of the last things on the Agenda was “Board compensation”. Now, the minutes from this meeting are not yet online, but according to this article by the Herald’s Jennifer Parks,
I’ve got three points to make here: 1) While pretty much everyone in state government is taking mandatory furlough days, the Lee County School Board is doing it “voluntarily” – meaning that they don’t actually have to if they don’t want to. If Superintendent Walters really wanted to feel the “concept” of the furloughs teachers are facing – which other systems, including – so I have been told – Worth County Schools, have been able to avoid by making cuts elsewhere, the Board would have made their own furloughs mandatory as well. 2) Why are personnel other than teachers and the School Board – such as administrators, central office staff, and support staff (which are almost exclusively local payroll, not State) – not facing furlough days, either voluntary or mandatory? After all, with no teachers and no students, there is no one around to “support” or “administer”. 3) Maybe Superintendent Walters and the School Board didn’t realize it, but teachers are actually among the LAST State-paid employees to face furloughs. Indeed, other state employees in a variety of areas have been facing furlough days for roughly the past year already, and recently the General Assembly announced that they would take furlough days. Governor Perdue also has taken furlough days, and his staff will roughly a month from now. Education accounts for 55% of the State budget, yet until now the largest chunk of that – teacher salaries – has remained untouched. I’m taking a personal hit from this, as my wife is a teacher, and yet I still say that the Governor made the right call here. By the way, Governor Perdue does NOT have the legal authority to furlough teachers, and he did NOT furlough teachers – no matter what the local boards of education tell you. What he did was to lower the amount of money the State sends the local boards of education by the equivalent of three days per teacher, and local school boards could choose for themselves how to absorb that cut. Some systems chose to cut in central office staff and other areas of the budget, though many are furloughing teachers and blaming it – incorrectly – on the Governor and the General Assembly. In a recent conversation, a friend of mine pointed out that there were a lot of areas of local government I seem dead set against, but what was I in favor of? Seemed to me like a fair enough question, so why not lay it all out? Let me preface this by saying I don’t pretend to understand every aspect of city government. I’m educated to some extent, and more so than most, but there were be aspects that might get missed. My priority is public safety. Cops, and firemen are number one on my list, along with the equipment and training of course. These are people who are charged with keeping people safe and have had their brothers killed in the line of duty while living up to that charge. Maybe it’s just me, but they earned that number one spot to me. Next, I have to put courts and jails. An efficient court system needs to function to deal with those who break the laws of this town. Jails, obviously, are there for dealing with these law breakers. Without them, we’d have criminals running the streets and frankly, we’ve got enough there already. Of course, most courts are funded with state dollars, not local, but still…this has got to be a priority. After this, I classify roads as being one of the biggies. Good quality roads are needed not just so people can get to work, but so emergency vehicles can get to the injured and for commerce to proceed efficiently. Bad roads may well deter new businesses from opening in the area. Besides, no one wants to ride on bumpy roads. After that, public records are important. Since our society is set up to depend on government maintained records, we need to ensure that the offices that deal with those are good to go. Appropriate staffing, state of the art technology, whatever. And next? That’s it. We can argue about what the city should provide or not, but these are the minimum I can think of right off the top of my head. Obviously, this list may not be what you would think. That’s cool. In fact, I urge you to convince me on other aspects that should be on this list. Keep in mind, this is for a stripped down government. Personally, I’d rather offer less and it be the best than offer more and it all pretty much suck. But I’m open to be convinced. Inquiring minds want to know after all! Besides, I may well have missed something that should be there by my own reckoning! I first heard of the association with the AARP and the healthcare reform proposals two weeks ago when it was unveiled that some of the President’s Town Hall meetings were sponsored by the organization. With so much talk about the horrors of the legislation in regards to our senior citizens, I was shocked. When Carl Dasher passed out the list of Myths vs Facts at the meeting in Moultrie, Georgia, he explained that the myths are being spread by special interest groups that have an agenda of squashing any reform. That too is a myth! The truth is that the concerns raised are legitimate, and they are being raised by ordinary citizens, not special interest groups. Whenever SWGA Politics takes a position, it’s easy to discount. We’re pretty much open with our biases from the get go, which leads others into believing we’re somehow suspect. In fact, one city commissioner (who will remain nameless at this time) who was directed here to find the truth, responded with “you are joking, right?” Yet, slowly but surely, our positions become the mainstream and become represented in the Albany Herald and on the local TV stations. Then, what we call for seems to start happening. Funny, ain’t it? Yesterday, WALB’s Jim Wilcox’s Viewpoint piece takes direct aim at Albany City Manager Al Lott. Continue reading Are Lott’s days numbered?
The AARP of Colquitt County, Georgia hosted a town hall on healthcare reform on Tuesday, August 11 at 6:00pm in the Colquitt Regional Medical Center. The meeting was held in the Ferguson Room of the hospital which was overflowing with 41 people in attendance. The meeting was opened by AARP member Julia Johnston. Visitors watched a video produced by the AARP which detailed the perceived needs of their members and how those needs would be met by the potential reforms in healthcare. The video segments included topics such as Affordable Coverage, Improve Medicare, Lower Prescription Costs, and Expand Long Term Care. The video began with a message from Barry Rand, the CEO of AARP. He said that members, like most Americans, want healthcare reform now. Over the summer, I took two issues to heart and have begun working on talking to various members of the General Assembly and the public about them. Those two issues were Georgia’s ballot access laws and daytime meetings by local governing bodies. I have my own ideas on each of these subjects, but this post is specifically directed at the ballot access laws. My friend, Jason Pye, has his own bill proposal that basically lowers the petition requirement from 5% of the registered voters in the district to one percent of the registered voters. It also has provisions so that even that lowered number can be further reduced or waived if certain conditions are met. My ideas all center around a different tack to solving this problem: Whereas Jason strikes at petition requirements, I strike at the very distinctions between political ‘party’, ‘body’, and ‘organization’. I also offer a very mild, pragmatic bill that I like better than current law, but is still far from what I would actually like to see. When President Bush first rolled out the concept of Free Speech Zones, the left was outraged, and rightly so. The idea of confining dissenters into a small area away from the man in power was about as un-American as it goes. Speaking truth to power is a great American tradition, especially when that truth is “you suck!” Now, the Democrats are in power. Apparently, the good old “free speech zone” is quite alright when it’s your turn in power. Continue reading Free Speech Zone? Or silencing dissent? |
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