COLUMN: Pendergrass: An illegitimate government

That much became clear Tuesday at the town’s city council meeting where the town’s mayor and elected officials faced a slew of angry citizens.

For about 45 minutes, the good citizens of Pendergrass — around 85 people in attendance — confronted their council about the corruption allegations brought out in July by three whistleblowers.

But it was all for naught. The council doesn’t give a damn that citizens are upset.

At the end of the citizens’ comments, Mayor Monk Tolbert adjourned the meeting, then he and a quorum of council members walked across the street to his real estate office, apparently to hold an illegal closed door council meeting.

So much for open, honest government in Pendergrass. The earlier meeting with the citizens was just a dog-and-pony show; the real city council meeting was to be done in secret away from the prying eyes of all the riff-raff citizenry. (See the full story about this effort in another story on Page 1A.)

Even before his move to hold closed-door meeting, Tolbert misled citizens about the real status of an investigation into the city by the GBI.

In a statement he read to the citizens, the mayor told the crowd that a district attorney and GBI investigation into the town had been completed.

In fact, the investigation, which is being done by the GBI, hasn’t even begun. Tolbert twisted the facts to make it sound like an investigation into the city was already over and that everything was cleared up.

Citizens of Pendergrass, when your mayor can’t be trusted to tell the full truth, there’s not much hope.

To the citizens of Pendergrass who stood up Tuesday night, I applaud you. That took guts. It’s the first time in many years that citizens in town showed a real interest in what’s been going on.

But I fear it was too little, too late. All Mayor Tolbert and the Pendergrass council care about is doing the bidding of “the family.”

The mayor and his sidekick city administrator Rob Russell have been talking a lot lately about how Pendergrass is a tight-knit “family.” Be loyal to “the family,” Russell tells his police officers. “We’re just a little ‘family’ here,” Tolbert tells television reporters.
But that depends on which family. Regular citizens don’t count.

Pendergrass only exists as a legal tool for Tolbert’s “family” and its real estate concerns. By controlling the government, “the family” can control its own zoning — and it can control your property’s zoning as well.

Turn to the outside for help? A group of whistleblowers did. What happened? They were fired by Mayor Tolbert because they weren’t loyal to “the family.”

Can Pendergrass citizens make a change in their leaders at the ballot box? Not likely. It would take years to try and unseat “the family” control of the town.

Pendergrass is a town owned and controlled by “the family.” It is beyond any normal political standards.

And the good citizens who live there are stuck. If they want to sell and move, they can’t. Who would knowingly buy a house in Pendergrass and live under a dictatorship?

The Pendergrass government has evolved into an illegitimate government, one that is ethically and morally bankrupt. There are no checks and balances. Citizens in the town have no influence on the government that taxes them.

Pendergrass is Georgia’s worst government. Perhaps it should no longer exist.

Mike Buffington is editor of The Jackson Herald. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.