Said Enough?

During the Feb. 12 meeting of the Board of County Commissioners one taxpayer made a dreadful mistake.

He had the audacious idea to wonder where commissioners were on county-wide voting and the replies, or better characterized, the responses, were certainly a lesson for all county residents.

After the taxpayer’s brief comments, Commissioner Bill Williams asked the chairman if he could explain.

The explanation was one that residents have become all too familiar with - and to paraphrase here - and that is that the county was being held hostage on county-wide voting by three votes, those of commissioners Billy Traylor, Carmen McLemore and Nathan Peters, Jr.

Williams attempted to explain that because upon the casting of the last vote on the issue he and Commissioner Jerry Barnes were on the losing side on a motion to move ahead on eliminating single-member districts, he and Mr. Barnes were prohibited by procedure from re-raising the issue.

The chairman, Mr. Traylor, wasn’t even willing to offer an explanation - and, of course, Mr. Peters and Mr. McLemore never uttered a peep - effectively telling the gentleman that all that needed to be said on the topic had been said.

This might have been the reason the gentleman even had the courage to stand up - doing so with county commissioners comes with peril.

Because the commissioners, especially two, have been all over the map while trying to avoid that point where the rubber hits the road on getting rid of this out-dated, good-old-boy circus called our system of county government.

These are commissioners who profess to have the pulse of the people - last year one remarked that people in his district didn’t really want county-wide voting - but three of them have decided to hold up the wishes of more than 4,000 residents.

Commissioners, or at least three, seem to have forgotten that voters in every district, in all but one precinct, overwhelmingly supported county-wide voting when offered the chance to cast their vote without Big Brother-like over-the-shoulder gazing.

Not only did the issue carry the day, it was a resounding boom from the populace, with the numbers adding up to nearly 50 percent of all residents in the county.

There was a time in the past four years - yes, how time flies when having fun, but it has been almost four years since voters put that punctuation point on this issue - when two of those obstacles promised to resign if they did not continue down the path of forward momentum on county-wide voting.

There was a time in the last four years when the decision to excise money from the budget for legal fees for county-wide voting became another of those wink-wink moments when commissioners feign interest in doing the people’s work and then dodge in another direction.

A time when the matter was going, in the words of one of those three boulders in the road, all the way to the White House or the Supreme Court if necessary because the people had spoken.

The contrast could not be starker as this week local residents announce their candidacies for municipal election.

For those not living in either municipality, who are unfamiliar with the concept, these are elections in which all the voters - every single dadgum one of them - gets to vote on every single candidate.

None of that, ‘Hey, I’ve only got to worry about one-fifth of the voters and one-fifth of the city,’ but an honest to goodness election as the George, Thomas, Ben and their fellow fathers at the founding of the country envisioned.

In this year of supposed change on a national scale - after all, the choice for president is down to a woman, an African-American and a man considered ready for pasture a few generations ago - there is this nagging problem for Gulf County: voters are still stuck in the same tax-soaking, inefficiently-operated, personally-aggrandizing system of government.

And damn to those who dare question the status quo.

From this corner, a template to gauge any candidate for any local office, constitutional officer to municipal official this year, is that the candidate take an active stance against single-member districts.

County commissioners may hold the key votes, but the more and heftier the push, the less commissioners will be able to continue to use the issue as a political survival chit, the less they will be able to soak taxpayers to operate a patronage system designed to ensure re-election.

So, commissioners should cut some slack to the man who had the bravery to ask a small question about county-wide voting.

Given the words and actions of at least three of the commissioners the past three-plus years, there seems plenty more that should be said to taxpayers to explain why they continue to be forced to live with a rigged game.