This is Our County?

This is a commissioner’s county; everybody else is just living in it.

Last week during a regular meeting of the Board of County Commissioners there was not much out of the ordinary.

Dealing with a few important issues and maintaining decorum, commissioners efficiently went through the agenda in a brisk 1:15 or so and went on their way, likely to convene at a local restaurant, as they have so often.

But as regular as the meeting was in tone and agenda, so to the code language that keeps most of the citizenry down on the farm when it comes to information and influence.

Any observer would be able to count at least five times, the number was surely more, that a commissioner spoke of “my district.”

Not once was “our county” invoked, just a repeated use of the language of ownership, “my district.”

At one point, during a discussion of roadside trash, one commissioner noted there were issues in “my district” and probably some in another commissioners’ district, “the others I don’t know about.”

But the consequences of this entitlement were evident in two decisions.

One was the time zone petition drive undertaken by students in an American government class at Wewahitchka High School.

Commissioners approved putting not one but two questions on the ballot next year. Do voters favor being in the Eastern Time zone, yes or no? Do voters favor the county on Central Time, yes or no?

Not the question on the petitions that were handed to commissioners. Not the question signers were asked to put their John Hancock’s on.

Those petitions asked if people wanted the county unified under “Central Time?” There were specifics for identifying Central Time, reasons reiterated by the students and their teacher, Matt Bullard.

So instead of assisting Bullard in teaching a lesson in how to petition government, the Board of County Commissioners provided an entirely different form of instruction.

On its face, the petition question the students crafted and traveled throughout the community with was innocuous.

Good work, yes, but the referendum was non-binding the students repeatedly emphasized – not understanding that if history is a guide all county referendums are non-binding – and if the vote went against unification under Central Time, so be it.

Everybody could go about their business and the clocks would remain the same.

But in changing the language of the petition for next year’s ballot, commissioners effectively provided a mechanism under which the county would be poised for unification under one of two time zones, regardless of the vote, and those living in the other would just have to live the change.

Yes, there are hurdles from county resolution to time zone change, but ultimately forcing folks in either time zone to adopt the other, because commissioners subtly changed the wording from petition to ballot, would only exacerbate the polarization in the county that was one of the driving forces for Bullard and his students.

The other issue which deserved only a passing reference pertained to the consolidation effort. Turns out all that moving, on-site preparation, even some pouring of concrete, occurred before the county had secured a stormwater management permit from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

The county has ordered the buildings, is prepared to pour slabs, abandoned other perfectly suitable work spaces, and done so without a permit any entity must have to undertake such work, particularly on a parcel of land commissioner long ago acknowledged had some wetland issues.

This at a time when the county has serious stormwater management issues that must be addressed in Indian Pass and St. Joseph Peninsula – enough for a coalition of homeowners to form after spending three weeks wading through water after late summer storms.

At a time when the county has stormwater management issues in St. Joseph Shores, where some homeowners were in litigation with the St. Joe Company over what was essentially clear-cutting take place around them and causing flooding problems.

To say the county has a stormwater management issue as a whole would be an understatement, but commissioner myopically see only what matters to the constituents who will get them re-elected, to “my district.”

Mix a bit of entitlement into a batch of public dollars and the results are alarming.

But maybe the most troubling part of last week’s meeting was a discussion about the state of the state’s economy.

It is not pretty, and won’t be for several years. That means, as was noted by commissioners, that many fiscal mandates will roll downhill to the local level.

When the local level is a county divided in fifths, a county which has at the top of the organizational chart five men whose sense of vision and mission extends only to their district boundary lines, when those districts are “my districts,” we are all in trouble.

Because if difficult times teach anything it is that the whole can only be better than the sum of its parts.

And right now this is the commissioners’ county; everybody else is just parts.