Consolidating Vision

Last week’s front page headline, coming to your doorstep on April 1, might have seemed like an April’s Fool joke.

“Consolidation plan moves ahead.”

That would be county consolidation. The consolidation plan sold last year like carnival elixir as one of the balms for a bleeding budget.

Consolidation would save the county an estimated half a million bucks, commissioners asserted vehemently.

Might not be in a year or two, but the savings would come, no question.

Those naysayers? Didn’t have a clue.

Well, as it turns out, maybe they did.

After having left sitting on a loading dock since November a prefabricated building commissioners pushed to have built on a fast-track, the Board of County Commissioners was forced to jump or move out of the way.

And it took commissioners two meetings to make a binding decision and still remained as divided as possible as to whether and how to proceed.

The question for two commissioners was whether the county could afford to build the new public works building at all.

Wait until we are sure we have the money, they contended, not a bad argument considering the board is taking 3 percent of every department and constitutional officer’s current fiscal budget with an eye toward a bleak coming fiscal year.

How reassuring to those having money taken from them that Commissioner Nathan Peters, Jr. would assert that once money budgeted for consolidation was taken out of the budget it likely wasn’t going back in.

In simple words, Mr. Peters explained the abyss taxpayer dollars have trickled into for decades.

So after considerable hang-wringing, not to mention the typical flop, flip or any combination, commissioners took another move forward in a plan that they trumpeted since last year.

The move to Howard Creek would bring operational efficiency, they have said, even though that assertion defied logic with key departments reporting each day to an area in the county that might be centrally-located geographically, but not even remotely operationally.

Moving key departments into new buildings would not really be an additional expense, commissioners said, even though perfectly useful and in some cases recently-constructed buildings were more than adequate.

There have been some offset in costs by eliminating a few positions but clearly commissioners are sharply divided over the merits of consolidation as the bills have come due.

It was ironic that Commissioner Billy Traylor pronounced that if the county could afford the building it could afford to cease further layoffs since consolidation has been from the get-go a politely put way of laying people off.

Commissioners just didn’t have the itch to call consolidation for what it was – a grasp and gasp toward fiscal responsibility on the backs of the people who in many cases most benefited from the lack of it over a five-year period at the dawn of the millennium.

The day of reckoning on those carefree spending days has arrived and it will be the working stiff and taxpayers – watch out for that millage rate this year as property values tumble again – certainly not commissioners, who will pay the price.

This episode is illustrative of the central ailment in the county.

The five county commissioners, it could be safely argued, are excellent “district” commissioners.

They know how to work a district, to respond to the constituents in their districts and how to secure spoils and tributes, in the form of dirt for homes, paved roads, sewer and water from the cities, in order to boost their standing in their districts.

They’ll even ignore their own ordinances and comp plan or state regulations if it means being Johnny on the Spot for their districts.

That in turn ensures re-election, particularly when the total number of potential voters with say in their political future is less than half of those John Reeves and Lorinda Gingell will face in a Port St. Joe city election next month.

The flip side is that being a “county” commissioner sometimes gets in the way.

Consolidation, from permitting issues to funding to the Howard Creek complex, is a fine example of a project that is begun in unison and devolves into a state of chaos as it moves ahead and competing agendas intervene.

If there is no coherent and unified vision from the Board of County Commissioners meeting room, what should the public, the taxpayers, believe about how their money is being spent?

The county is governed by five men with differing agendas that change like the summer breeze.

And these men don’t want to be county representatives. If they did they would address the one issue on which voters have expressed overwhelming consensus over the years.

Eleven years ago this month, in this newspaper, an article noted how many times, and at what margins, voters in this county had pushed for a return to county-wide voting, pushed to represented by “county” commissioners not district commissioners.

That would be 11 years and at least two more referendums with similar results ago.

Yet the issue is in limbo while commissioners spout outlandish interpretations of what the voters of their “districts” really want, a disingenuous argument given that voters in every district have overwhelmingly supported county-wide voting.

Even though these economic times shout for unified vision and leadership, commissioners demonstrate by action that they wish to go on being “district” commissioners, not “county” commissioners.

As long as those desires remain unchallenged the county will be hindered by commissioners who represent only “districts.”

And consolidation, of departments, of governmental vision and responsibility, will be rendered nothing but rhetoric.