Living, and spending, in a cocoon

Attempting to sort out the priorities of the Board of County Commissioners these days would seem to require an interpreter.

For months we have heard commissioners pleading poverty.

There was no way to implement the will of the people on county-wide voting, Commissioner Tan Smiley insisted again and again, because “we don’t have the money.”

The county is broke. Nowhere could be found the dollars to put actions to the voter mandate now seven years old to strip away single member districts and bring about county-wide voting.

But there,Tuesday, was Smiley and the rest of the commission approving allotting some $10,000 to the Washington Improvement Group (WIG) to provide programs at the Washington High Gym.

And during that same meeting commissioners approved spending more than $150,000 – already budgeted which makes the taste easier to swallow – to erect a pre-fabricated building the county never needed in the first place.

Apparently commissioners are deaf or blind to a school district facing a $2 million shortfall and reducing the school week from five to four days.

And they seem immune to an example of frugality such as the sheriff selling old cars to purchase a new one and selling guns for operational expenses.

The Washington Gym dollars are particularly onerous for county taxpayers.

The city of Port St. Joe and, in particular the Port St. Joe Redevelopment Agency are working on several initiatives to keep the doors of the gym open and establish “youth enrichment” programs at the gym – county commissioners fibbed in asserting the city was doing nothing.

The Gulf Coast Workforce Board has come on board with dollars to open the doors twice a week and on Saturday and provide programs and a program coordinator through May.

The Port St. Joe Redevelopment Agency is already using tax dollars to provide a youth enrichment grant of $15,000 to a local non-profit to operate programs from the gym and the city of Port St. Joe spends tax dollars for summer programs at the gym.

Yet the county commissioner who has most raised the roof about spending and budgets and the county being broke turns around and put the taxpayers on the hook for another $10,000 for programs and open hours at the gym.

This wasn’t a rash act.

The $10,000 was put up as matching funds in the WIG application for the PSJRA grant – indicating county approval was, unethically, in the bag prior to the Tuesday’s meeting – before the PSJRA board even selected the WIG application from among the handful of proposals from local non-profits.

That action could be fairly interpreted in one of two ways.

The $10,000 is a shot across the bow of the PSJRA board to avoid political fallout and select the WIG application regardless of its strength compared to other applications.

Or, should the PSJRA board find and select a stronger applicant, WIG remains in the mix with $10,000 from county taxpayers and the outcome seems certain to be a turf war.

That the WIG group has been late to this discussion to begin with – the city has wrestled with keeping the gym open since last fall and WIG only came to the commission in the past month – is further testament to a looming tussle over what happens to the gym.

This is single-member district politics at its most blatant.

The argument that county taxpayers should somehow foot the bill for maintaining the gym – given the parallel efforts and tax dollars already devoted to the opening and maintaining of the gym – is elusive at best.

For it to come from the one commissioner who argued hard and long to hold up county-wide voting because the county is broke renders the expenditure baffling and laughable – if county taxpayers were in the mood to laugh at these spending shenanigans.

Such as the pre-fabricated building originally to be placed on the consolidation site in Howard Creek.

The county already reaped the savings from departmental consolidation – those savings were real people losing their jobs.

Physical consolidation at Howard Creek never made sense. The site was in a flood zone and the county had perfectly serviceable buildings for its various departments.

Consider it this way: the school district would be well down the list of any state capital outlay money for a consolidated school because its buildings of 40-50 years of age remain perfectly functional. The county is no different.

There are options: sell the building, break it down for pieces to sell, store it, for example, at the Industrial Park in Dalkeith.

But just because the county budgeted almost $200,000 to erect the building at Howard Creek doesn’t mean it must be built just for the sake of spending the money. Given the near future and budget prospects, would not that money be better saved?

That isn’t the logic, however, among the commissioners who can somehow validate a $14,000 trip for six – including administrator, attorney and four commissioners – to Washington, D.C. for a conference and lobbying that, for all the impact it is likely to have for Gulf County, could have been accomplished by a single commissioner.

Until every county voter can cast a vote on every commission seat commissioners will remain free to pick and choose when to plead poverty and when to needlessly and wastefully spend other people’s money.