You have to hand it to Nicholson leaders, they know how to stir up more useless debate than just about any town in the area.
Last week, the city council argued over how much to spend on new library books this year. Mayor Ronnie Maxwell wanted around $25,000 for new books, saying the city was behind on book replacement.
Which of course begs the question: Why? Where was the mayor these last four years and why did he let the city get so far behind?
But the book issue is minor compared to other things. For one, it appears that the city council held an illegal meeting with the librarian recently to discuss the book budget.
Will Jackson County’s towns ever learn? Illegal government meetings do nothing to engender public support. Governments that do business in secret have something to hide and the public knows it.
The mayor also suggested that plans to upgrade the appearance of the library on the inside didn’t need to be budgeted because that would come from SPLOST money.
Really? After all of the abuse of SPLOST dollars locally, the mayor really thinks voters are going to give him more money to play with? Advice: Don’t count your dollars before they’re in the bank.
But the biggest issue in Nicholson is that it’s now March 3; why wasn’t the town’s 2010 budget planned and adopted before the start of the year?
Nicholson, like a lot of area towns, is dysfunctional. Instead of serving the public interest, town leaders are pursuing their own interests.
Too bad citizens don’t seem to give a darn.
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President Obama came to Georgia this week. Is your life better?
Didn’t think so.
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Speaking of the president, his obsessive push to have the government take over health care in the country is fomenting a major backlash. Such top-down mandates is not what the public wants; the public wants some measure of control over costs and to rein in abusive insurance firms, but it does not want bureaucrats in charge of health care.
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The jobless rate in Georgia hit a new high last month. Those who claim the recession is over are looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. The recession won’t be over until the jobless rate comes down and that won’t happen until businesses start hiring. But businesses aren’t going to hire with all the instability in government and on Wall Street.
The next big threat is inflation due to the massive federal deficit that Washington has chosen to ignore.
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Joke of the day: The IOC this week took back American Olympic skier Lindsay Vonn’s gold medal and gave it to President Obama. The reason? He is going downhill faster than Vonn.
Mike Buffington is editor of The Jackson Herald. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.
Just so you know, Mike, there are people who live in Nicholson who do not like this constant stupidity that is going on in our local government.
But, you know what? Nicholson is just like every other town. The average person doesn't have time to run the city (if we did, why would we need elected "officials"?), and if you are NOT in office the city councils and mayors of the small towns do what ever they want to do regardless of what any mere "resident" might say or do. Just read your own articles and editorials about the other towns in Jackson County if you want evidence of this.
As for changing things, I personally have wasted countless hours attending city council meetings, practially begging the city council to reconsider several bone-headed ordinances that they put into effect that are "pro" city government and "anti" city resident. The result? At least one of the ordinances WAS changed...but the changes were completely OPPOSITE of what I had painstakingly explained needed to be done. The rest of the time, I may as well have been talking to tree stumps. And I'm not the only city resident that has experienced this kind of reception from my "elected representatives".
And to make matters worse, it doesn't seem to matter WHO gets elected mayor or to the city council, the same old things always seem to keep rolling around in the mud.
I've said it before and I'll say it here: ALL elected officials need to ask themselves "What would an average citizen off of the street do?" when they start passing laws, making ordinances, planning budgets, and making any government related decision.
But that simply is NOT how it is done in our various levels of government.
So, Mike, lets hear what YOU would do to fix this mess? You always seem to have a lot of opinions about how bad things are, but I don't see you offering any workable solutions. Why don't you make a REAL difference and do something other than talk about it? Maybe you've been covering politics in this county so long you've become just like the politians, all talk and no "do".
You asked my solution: Unincorporate Nicholson and let it be a community without a government. What does the city government do for local citizens that can't be done either by the private sector or by the county government? Ditto for many other small towns where government bureaucracy exists for no good reason. We all complain about government waste and focus on the national level, but most government waste is in our own back yards in small towns where tax money is squandered on piddly projects that have little benefit on citizens.
Alas, I don't have the power to make that happen, but you and your fellow citizens do.
I didn't ask what the newpaper suggested. I asked for YOUR ideas on just exactly how you expect people to make changes to the local government. If things were so easy to fix, do you think I would still be here debating this with you?
So, since we are talking about suggestions, just exactly how can we "citizens" vote in someone who would be a better mayor or city councilman, when the choice of who we can vote for is limited to who is on the ballet? If the "other guy" is just as bad or worse than the current guy, how can we fix anything? (And before you suggest that I run for office, IF I was qualified, I'd never get elected, since I'm not part of the "good old boy" network.)
Personally, I certainly do NOT have a problem with unincorporating Nicholson, or the rest of the towns in Jackson County either, for that matter, but get with the real world here, Mike. If I were to even suggest such a thing in Nicholson, I would probably be run out of town on a rail.
So, I'm still waiting for real solutions that have a decent possibility of working.
You say that my fellow citizens and I have the power to make things happen, but you know as well as I that it takes a majority. One person or even a small group of citizens are NOT able to make a difference if the "good old boys" and their families are going to vote for the same old people again and again.
And my main point is that its EASY for you and everyone else to point out the obvious, but not so easy to come up with REAL answers to fix these problems. And like is so often said, if you aren't part of the solution, you're just another part of the problem.
But to clarify something for you about the "OOPs antiques", there was an automobile junk yard at the location in the "middle" of town long before the "OOPs antiques" were there, and it was there since before I was born in the 1960's. So its nothing even remotely new. If anything, the "OOPs antiques" is a vast improvement over junk cars. So, no, unincorporating Nicholson wouldn't have kept the "junk yard" out of the middle of town, unless of course you have a time machine you can use to go back and undo it. And if Nicholson was unincorporated, there wouldn't be a "town" to have the junk yard in the middle of, so it would be a moot point. (And by the way, Nicholson DOES have zoning, just try to put a building in somewhere inside of the city limits and see for yourself.)