Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 14A
I FORSYTH COUNTY NEWS Sunday, APRIL 8,2001
The Forsyth County News
Opinion
This is a page of opinions - ours, yours and others.
Signed columns and cartoons are the opinions of the
writers and artists and may not reflect our views.
Public best served
by full disclosure
of LLC interests
A weakness in state laws
and local ordinances as
they apply to government
agencies and those with whom
they do business was made obvi
ous in the county’s recent acqui
sition of property for a waste
water treatment plant in the Big
Creek Basin.
In that transaction, the county
paid $2 million to an LLC —a
limited liability company to
buy its contract on the property.
The problem with such a
transaction is that no one knows
who the partners are in the LLC,
so there is no way of knowing if
there is a conflict of interest with
any of those making the decision
to do business with it.
An LLC is a form of business
partnership that offers certain tax
and legal benefits to its partners.
It also offers a chance for
anonymity, as only the name of a
registered agent is required to be
filed with the Secretary of State’s
office.
While LLCs offer a viable
option for many business endeav
ors, the elusiveness of their mem
bers poses problems when inter
acting with the government.
For example, Forsyth County
commissioners have in their
ethics policies one of the strictest
disclosure provisions of any
county when it comes to potential
conflicts of interest in rezoning
matters. The county policy
requires applicants for rezonings
to disclose if they have given as
little as SIOO as a campaign con
tribution to any county official
who will vote on the proposed
rezoning. The policy requires
opponents of rezonings to make
similar disclosures.
The same policy applies for
those submitting bids to do work
for the county, with the added
provision that elected officials
must publicly announce that they
have received donations from any
such potential vendor.
But, in the case of an LLC, it
is virtually impossible to identify
the partners, impossible to verify
whether campaign contributions
have been made to elected offi-
Sawnee Arts Center
needs your support
The recently renamed Sawnee
Cultural Arts Center last month
brought to Cumming a one-man
show “Mark Twain: On
Stage!” The show was the first
for the center since changing its
operational strategy to better
serve the community.
The Center has in the past
served primarily as the meeting
room of choice for large gather
ings and community events.
While those services will contin
ue, the Center now plans to work
to bring more arts and cultural
opportunities into the area.
In order for such an effort to
be successful, those responsible
for the operation of the Center
cials by individual members of an
LLC, and impossible to know
whether there are any relation
ships between elected officials
and those who are partnered in an
LLC venture.
The LLC is a favored vehicle
for doing business for those in the
development community, where
individual investors often join
forces to buy, develop and market
parcels of land. Those same
LLCs make rezoning requests of
the county, donate money to
political campaigns and in some
cases sell land to the county for
its needs.
With few exceptions, no one
really knows who they are doing
business under an LLC umbrella.
We think the people have a right
to know with whom the county is
doing business, whether as a
rezoning applicant, vendor or
landowner selling property to the
county.
Commission Chairman John
Kieffer was instrumental in the
shaping of the county’s ethics
policy, pushing hard last year to
have the threshold for donations
lowered. Given his proven inter
est in a strict ethics policy for
county commissioners, it would
seem logical that Kieffer would
champion the idea that LLCs
doing business with the county
be required to make public the
names of all partners.
We encourage the commis
sioners and their attorneys to
draft and adopt a policy that
would require such disclosure
from any LLC with business to
conduct before the county com
mission and, in doing so, to add
some real teeth to the code of
ethics.
We would also encourage
commissioners to add to their
existing ethics policy a provision
requiring full disclosure of cam
paign contributions or other
potential conflicts of interest
from any party with which the
county is negotiating to purchase
property, with a reasonable provi
sion to exclude from such disclo
sure the small parcels of land rou
tinely acquired for rights of way.
need to know what residents of
the county would like to see, hear
and view.
If you have ideas as to the sort
of artistic and cultural endeavors
that might be successful in the
county, call Center director Betsy
Brown at (770) 889-4977 and
share them with her.
The Sawnee Cultural Arts
Center is to be commended for
its efforts to add a new element
to the Forsyth County scene, but
it needs the support of the com
munity to succeed. We hope you
will find out what’s going on at
the Center, suggest program
ideas and give the effort your
support.
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Energy crisis Georgia-style
Georgia can relax. No Califomia-style energy
crisis will occur here. That’s a promise straight
from the lips of Public Service Commission
Chairman Lauren “Bubba” McDonald Jr.
McDonald issued his reassuring message just
as natural gas technicians fanned out across
Georgia to cut off gas service for an estimated
150,000 residents who have not been able to pay
their sky-high winter bills.
It’s a good thing we don’t have to fret about a
California kind of crisis. We have already had a
homegrown brand, resulting in part from energy
deregulation.
In 1998, the Georgia Legislature could wait
no longer. It just had to join the deregulation fad.
The airlines were doing it. The truckers were
doing it. The phone companies were doing it.
Deregulation was the Macarena of the economy.
With the natural gas industry promising better
service, a boost in the economy and all sorts of
other goodies, the lawmakers enacted a bill that
allowed independent gas marketers to set up their
own deals with consumers and wholesalers. The
regulators were out. The energy entrepreneurs
were in.
In less than two years, the free-market dream
of deregulated natural gas turned into a consumer
nightmare.
The first sign of trouble came when gas bills
suddenly became a mass of confusion. Some
folks received out-of-sight bills. Others were
billed not at all not for months. Then
Boom! they were hit with budget-busters.
Next came the bone-chilling winter of 2000-
2001. As temperatures plummeted, wholesale gas
prices soared. Naturally, higher prices were
passed straight through to the consumer. The
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said gas bills in
the Atlanta region were the third highest among
14 metro areas across the country.
The Public Service Commission and the
Atlanta Gas Light Co. challenged the figures,
said nosiree, we are not make that NOT the
third highest. Most people don’t care if we’re
third or 53rd. Individual families still couldn’t
Letters
New school should
not be named Matt
There are some of us who have a different
opinion about the naming of the new elementary
school.
Friendship and Ducktown lost their schools at
the same time Matt did. Out of fairness to the
other communities, the school should not have
been named Matt. After reading your editorial, I
felt that you should know that there are two sides
to every story.
Clara Mae Cox
Cumming
Arrests hurt people
trying to earn a living
How sad that Forsyth County can only arrest
Hispanic people trying to feed their families.
Those of us who are fortunate enough to
have regular employment, know when we leave
home each day we will be working. The
Hispanic laborers are far less fortunate and they
congregate where they hopefully will find work
in this case at a mobile home park where
employers gather to pick up them up for a day’s
work. I understand that written warnings were
distributed prior to the beginnings of arrests
but, unless and until some other alternative is
offered, I would feel a need to come to the only
available hiring location if putting bread and
milk in front of my children was a primary rea
son for leaving my bed each morning.
Perhaps, most disturbing was your newspa
per's comment that “the commission has taken
no formal action to address the problem.” The
concern is not likely to disappear by itself and.
Shipp
pay their SSOO or SBOO monthly gas bills. Or, if
they could, they had to cut their household bud
gets to the bone or dip into savings to keep warm.
The PSC granted a moratorium Jan. 17 on
delinquent gas bills. The delay officially ended
on April Fools’ Day. Now tens of thousands of
gas customers are scrambling to avoid the man in
the gray coveralls with the cutoff wrench.
Ah, but the Legislature and the PSC have seen
the light. Chairman McDonald tells us: “Neither
the commission nor the Georgia Legislature is
considering deregulation of Georgia’s electric
energy. The commission’s jurisdiction over
investor-owned utilities such as Georgia Power
and Savannah Electric remains intact.”
That’s good to know. But McDonald hasn’t
quite told us the whole story. Much of Georgia’s
electric power is priced and sold beyond the
jurisdiction of the PSC and the Legislature. And
much of it is already breathtakingly expensive.
True, Georgia Power, under the watchful eye
of the PSC and eager to lure new industries into
the state and region, has held electric rates to
about 15 percent below the national average.
The company’s corporate parent, the Southern
Company, is expanding its generating capacity to
keep pace with the region’s growth. Rate rebates
are in the works for many consumers. So
Southern has apparently indeed avoided the pit
falls of California.
However—
Many Georgians have stood by while their
residential electric rates have grown exponential-
in the meantime, employers in need of day
workers and people who fill that role are kept
apart. Everyone loses in that situation.
I urge the commission to begin serious con
sideration of creative ways to solve this prob
lem. There are people with no voice to express
this for themselves, who need to be treated in a
fairer and more compassionate way.
Creating a pick up zone on county property
may offer a solution and surely our leaders can
find ways to eliminate the liability concern
expressed in the article. What kind of liability
is created as charity canvassers take to the
busiest intersections with bucket in hand? Why
can we tolerate one and not the other? Has
effort been extended to learn how other coun
ties handle this same situation? Hispanic, 17- to
45-year-old day laborers are not a unique situa
tion to Hwy. 9 in Forsyth County. How is it
approached elsewhere?
I am extremely disturbed to see people has
sled because they wish to earn a livelihood.
Surely we in Forsyth County have the leader
ship to find a workable win/win solution that
will satisfy everyone’s needs.
Joan Vining McGovern
Cumming
Call to extend the
SPLOST not welcome
The April 1 front page story, “Schools
Study Funding Options,” would have made an
excellent April Fool’s joke, if it was indeed a
joke. Once again, we, the taxpayers of Forsyth
County, are being asked to feed the insatiable
appetite of our county government. This time
its the Board of Education asking for funding
again in the form of an extension of the
SPLOST, with the usual threat that if the voters
i . i ■ • I . 1
ly. These poor souls are served by barely regulat
ed electric membership cooperatives, creatures
born in the Depression to bring electric lights to
destitute farmers living in remote places.
Sixty years later, many of those cooperatives
have evolved into suburban monsters, boosting
residential rates so they can cut commercial rates
to compete with Georgia Power. In at least one
case, an EMC has created a brand-new corporate
entity to market everything from phone service to
cable television and even natural gas.
The fathers of the New Deal and the Rural
Electrification Administration must be spinning
in their graves. They never dreamed their rela
tively small help-the-farmer agencies would turn
into commercial behemoths that regularly grab
business away from investor-owned utilities,
often at the expense of their own EMC cus
tomers.
While the EMCs are not likely to precipitate a
crisis by themselves, they remain an uncontrolled
and often unpredictable ingredient in the increas
ingly complex recipe for reasonably priced ener
gy-
Add to this mix the environmentalists’ plea
for more restrictions on coal-fired generation and
their successful 20-year fight against more (and
much cleaner) nuclear generation facilities
and you have the beginning of a very worrisome
scenario.
At the start of spring, Chairman McDonald’s
promise of “no California here” is comforting
until one examines the many factors beyond his
control and realizes that a hot-hot summer could
wreak the same economic agony as the just-past
cold-cold winter.
So don’t worry about us repeating
California’s mistakes. Worry about us repeating
our own.
Bill Shipp is editor of Bill Shipp's Georgia, a
weekly newsletter about government and busi
ness. He can be reached at P. 0. Box 440755,
Kennesaw, GA 30144 or by calling (770) 422-
2543, email: bshipp@bellsouth.net, Web address:
http./Avww. billshipp. com.
don’t approve the SPLOST, an increase in prop
erty taxes or another bond referendum will be
required.
Yes, we’ve heard it before. Only a year and
a half ago county taxpayers were threatened
with higher property taxes if we didn’t approve
the $125 million bond referendum. The
Libertarian Party of Forsyth County warned
taxpayers back then that if the bond referendum
was passed, another tax increase would come
anyway. Well, the bond referendum passed by a
very slim margin, and here is our next tax
increase.
I think that we should instead be looking at
alternative ways to solve the increasing
demands that are being placed on our education
system. Encouraging home schooling, private
schools, and closer scrutiny of how the Board
of Education is spending our money are a few
examples. Until such efforts are made, I think
the best way we can keep from being made
fools is to vote “NO” every time an attempt is
made to extend the SPLOST, pass a bond refer
endum or increase taxes in any other way.
Kent Pirkle
Cumming
College registration
amazingly smooth
I want to thank all the wonderful people at
Lanier Tech (Forsyth Campus) for making the
registration process for the Spring semester fast,
smooth and painless. As an older student with
memories of the process in the ‘7os, total confu
sion and chaos, this was just a totally pleasant
experience.
Thank you all.
Al Dyer
Cumming