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Page 4A The Braselton News Wednesday, October 17, 2007 Opinion “Difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth ” -Thomas Jefferson Braseltoons by John Sheppard "Hey, I just a great tip, you in?" letters our views Hoschton government at a crossroads THE TOWN of Hoschton is at a crossroads. A major financial crisis has rattled the town govern ment this year, forcing the city council to cut its budget just to keep operating. Now the council is looking at next year’s budget and the situation isn’t promising. Either a city prop erty tax will have to be put in place, or some major cutbacks will have to happen in the city’s police de partment. At the heart of this issue is this fundamental ques tion: What do the town’s citizens expect of their city government? Town governments exist primarily to provide a higher level of service than citizens can get from a county government and to give more “local” con trol. That’s the theory, anyway. In reality, it isn’t unusual for small towns to bite off more than they can handle financially. Inexpe rience, inflated egos and mismanagement can all wreck a small town’s budget. That’s what happened to Hoschton last year. Town leaders put on some rose-colored glasses and made some major mistakes in their budgeting process. The result is the current financial crisis. It’s not too late for the town to turn this situation around, but that will only happen if Hoschton lead ers have the courage to make some tough deci sions today about next year’s budget. There are several guiding principals needed to resolve Hoschton’s financial problems: First, the town can’t spend its way out of this mess. Putting a city property tax in place would be a cop-out. City leaders would be taxing resident for their own mismanagement. The first order of busi ness in a financial crisis isn’t to raise taxes, but rather to cut expenses. Second, town leaders have to decide what is es sential to city citizens and what can be done by other governments. If Hoschton cuts back its police force, as is being discussed, would that cripple the town? Not likely. The truth is, the county sheriff’s depart ment or GBI handle the major cases in Hoschton anyway. Cutbacks in police may not be ideal, but it wouldn’t be devastating, either. If the city re ally wants to cut expenses, it has look at where the money is located. In Hoschton, like most small towns, that means the police department. Third, city leaders have to plan for the worst and hope for the best. The economy is down and that may drag on during 2008. Hoschton leaders must plan next year’s budget with that in mind and adjust its income projections accordingly. In short, take off any rose-colored glasses left over from last year. Plan for weak economic conditions. At the end of this process, Hoschton leaders should adopt the most conservative budget pos sible for 2008. It is much easier to adjust a budget up if next year proves to be better than projected, but it is very, very difficult to cut expenses in mid year as had to be done in 2007. If Hoschton leaders make some tough decisions today, they can avoid another crisis in 2008. If officials fail, the city may be thrown into a finan cial hole from which it may never recover. Says taxes too high, Dear Editor: After reading the letters to the editor in the local paper, I commend the people for standing up for what they believe is the right thing to do about the high taxes in Jackson County. What was left out is the issue of what is Jackson County doing for the senior citizens in this county? I think the elected officials should be for all the people instead of a selected few. What a shame and disgrace it is for the seniors to be treated this way. How can they go to church on Sunday and brag about what they have done? What the people do not understand is that they have already raised taxes by raising the assess ments on their homes. By doing this, they can turn around and make the public believe they are the good guys and vote down the increase in the mill- age rate. What a laugh. What we need to do is have a recall on all of the elected officials. If this were to happen, I would be happy to put my name on top of the list. Another thing is about the City of Jefferson not wanting churches in the downtown area. Satan has been turned loose. What is wrong with the preachers in this county? They should be in the pulpits every Sunday preaching against all the wrongdoings that are going on in this county. Is it going to take another Moses to lead the Satan on the loose people in this county out of the mess it is in? Enough said at this time. Sincerely, A. White Hoschton. The Braselton News A Publication of The Jackson Herald & Mainstreet Newspapers, Inc. Mike Buffington Editor & Co-Publisher mike @ mainstreetnews.com Scott Buffington Co-Publisher & Advertising Manager scott@mainstreenews.com Angela Gary Managing Editor angie @ mainstreetnews.com Kerri Testement News Editor kerri@mainstreetnews. com 706-367-5986 Jeremy Ginn Advertising jeremy@mainstreetnews.com 706-367-5990 Web Site: braseltonnews.com Classified Advertising classifieds @ mainstreetnews.com PO Box 908, Jefferson, Ga. 30549 General Phone: 706-367-5233 The well YOU WILL hear all sorts of projections from business and planning organizations that say Georgia’s population will grow by another two to three million people over the next couple of decades. Those numbers usually underlie discussions about what the state should do over the next 20 years to cope with this expected surge in population. These discussions are based on a faulty premise, because Georgia is not going to add millions of new residents in the coming years. The rea son is simple: we’re running out of water. In fact, we have just about reached the limits of water that can be provided for the people living here today. This can be easily confirmed by visiting the major lakes in North Georgia and observing how low the water levels have dropped during the current drought. It is not a pretty picture. State environmental officials are estimating that Lake Lanier has about three months worth of water left. Lake Allatoona is getting higher and drier by the day. The Dog River reservoir in Douglas County has dropped below the 50 percent capacity mark. The Bear Creek reservoir in northeast Georgia could run dry by Christmas. We’re running out of water and this is not a development that should have surprised us. The warnings have been out there for years. My old friend Charlie Seabrook, one of the best environmental reporters who ever worked for the Atlanta newspapers, once wrote an article about the coming water shortages for the Journal-Constitution. Here are some excerpts from that article. “Federal water experts on Tuesday presented data that suggest fast-growing metro Atlanta is taking all the water that Lake Lanier and the Chattahoochee River can provide, decades before it was forecast to have reached that limit. . .. “State environmental officials had predicted metro Atlanta would not exhaust Lanier and the Chattahoochee until 2030. Officials with the Georgia Environmental Protection Division insisted Tuesday their data show that projection is still sound. “But new water use data presented by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sug gest the region already is close to reaching - or in some cases exceeding - the predicted 2030 levels. The corps said metro Atlanta, which grew from 3 million runs dry residents in 1990 to 4.1 million in 2000, actually exceeded expected water use for 2030 during some of 1999 and 2000. . . .” That article was published in 2002 - when state officials still had time to address the problem. Environmental Protection Director Carol Couch, who recently ordered a clamp- down on outdoor water use in North Georgia because of the drought, thinks the state can work through its water problems by building a series of new reservoirs and possibly transferring water from one basin to another. That may not be politically possible. Any large-scale efforts to pipe more water into the metro Atlanta area would probably trigger a civil war with people in other parts of the state who don’t want to share their water. You’ve also got developers who, thanks to the new “private cities” law, want to build planned communities in South Georgia that will drain away even more of the precious resource. Even if you could somehow overcome these political obstacles, where are you going to find the billions of dollars it would take to build all these reservoirs? The current political leadership in the governor’s office and the Legislature are ideologi cally opposed to any tax increases. House Speaker Glenn Richardson, in fact, is pushing a proposal to eliminate property taxes that would empty the state treasury even more. If Richardson’s property tax proposal becomes law, we won’t even be able to fund the current level of services provided by state government, let alone build expensive new reservoirs. What then? When Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle sat down for an informal chat with capitol reporters last week, I asked him if Georgia, just maybe, was reaching its upper limit of popu lation growth because of the water shortage. Absolutely not, he replied. “I think there is a concerted effort to try to create fear among Georgians by stop ping growth with the threat of no longer having the water resources,” Cagle said. “If we simply will manage the resource that falls from the sky - not necessarily the abundance of resource that we have on the ground - then we can take care of our needs way, way into the future.” With all due respect to the lieutenant governor, I don’t think so. The depleted reservoirs across North Georgia are a stark reminder that the well has just about run dry. Tom Crawford is the editor of Capitol Impact’s Georgia Report, an Internet news site at www.gareport.com that covers government and politics in Georgia. Homecoming traditions IT’S THAT time of year again when the photos of high school homecoming queens will be pub lished in local newspapers. It’s also that time of year when high school administrators will al low students to wear funky outfits that serve no educational purpose. The outfits will follow themes, such as “baby day,” “twins day” and “blast from the past day.” And it’s that time of year when high school rivalries reach their peak for the school year. Ah, fall is finally here (although it officially “arrived” almost a month ago). Homecoming is supposed to be the season when you return to your alma mater and reflect on the days of the past. I spent my high school days in two states, Texas and Georgia. It’s a big culture shock coming from a high school in Texas that compares in size to Mill Creek High School to a significantly smaller school in Georgia. You know that saying that high school football is everything in Texas? Well, it’s true. Football is king in the lone star state — the stadiums are bigger, the cheerleading squads have more people, and the drill team members can stand arm-to-arm from goal post to goal post. Nothing is spared when it comes to high school football in Texas. That’s especially true during home coming. At my high school in suburban Houston, homecoming was a major money-making event — especially for local florists and crafts stores. Mums were the big — and I mean big — thing at my high school in Texas. The mums in Texas are not the little flower ar rangements pinned on high school students here in Georgia. No, the mums in Texas are massive, head-to-toe arrangements that let everyone know that, yes, you have school spirit. My mum during my freshman year of high school in 1994 cost $60 for my mother to assemble — a bargain considering that most mums for girls at the time were at least $100. Texas mums generally included an artificial flower, plenty of rib bon in the school’s colors, a small figurine of the school’s mascot and even small bells. The mums usually weighed so much that there was a clever way to pin the ornament to a bra strap to keep it from ripping clothes. I would later show my Texas mum to some of my Georgia high school friends and they seemed aston ished that most of the student body would wear such a thing. Likewise, I felt uncomfortable about one homecoming tradition at my high school in Columbus, Ga. At the time, the student body was asked to select two “representa tives” for the freshman, sophomore and junior classes for homecom ing. The catch was that for each class, one of those students was white and the other was black. The senior homecoming queen, how ever, wasn’t limited by race. It’s hard to believe that about 10 years ago, my high school was still following the traditions of a segregated south when it came to homecoming. Thankfully, that homecoming tra dition ended shortly after I gradu ated from high school. Kerri Testement is the news editor for The Braselton News. Her e-mail address is kerri@mainstreetnews. com. Keri Testement kerri@mainstreet- news.com