FILE
It has been well documented that Habersham County is facing a litany of challenges in the coming years. We have documented our problems in story after story – hospital debt, landfill, jail and capital projects being bid over budget.
Our county needs strong leadership from its commissioners, but instead, we are seeing petty bickering and political nonsense.
Monday’s Board of Commissioners meeting started with the election of a new Chairman in Ty Akins, which was decided unanimously. Commissioner Bruce Harkness was approved for another year as vice-chairman despite a dissenting vote from the outgoing chairman Bruce Palmer, who seemingly voted mostly out of spite.
After an interminable meeting Monday, the commissioners went into executive session to discuss County Manager Alicia Vaughn’s contract in secret, presumably to keep the county’s internal dissension and dirty laundry out of the public eye.
But it did not take long to dump stinking laundry out all over the courtroom 90-plus minutes later.
The commissioners returned from the back room with Palmer and Harkness arguing, and Palmer accusing Harkness of “waffling” on issues, particularly the contract at hand.
Harkness did far more than waffle shortly after, planting seeds of mistrust and anger with his five-minute address shocking the remaining crowd.
Harkness then began to straddle a barbed wire fence with his words. Essentially he said he voted for Vaughn’s contract to keep her from walking out, noting that the county had no one available to replace her. He went so far as to say he had looked for a replacement, but couldn’t find one after contacting the Association County Commissioners of Georgia. He tried to intercede his own tirade with backhanded compliments every third remark or so, saying this was not about Vaughn personally or even professionally.
Frankly, if it is not about those two things, what is left?
Harkness says he works for the taxpayers, and one wonders what he thinks a good county manager should be paid. For the sake of argument, let us say a strong county manager could be found for $120,000 to run Habersham County.
Under this hypothetical scenario, $67,950 has been freed up from that line item in pay to the county manager. Will that amount of money build us a jail? Will it fix our landfill? Will it finish the animal shelter or the new 911 center? Will it put the radio system back in budget after it ran over by millions?
No, it will not. Now, will strong leadership over time fix these things, or will $67,950?
The commissioners were elected by the people, and they hired Vaughn to run the county. If they are dissatisfied with her performance, move on and find someone better, if they can. But if not, we need to unify this leadership and move toward solutions, not useless platitudes and political backhanding.