Newspaper Page Text
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13, 2018
THE JACKSON HERALD
PAGE 5A
Hustle and bustle of growth in local areas
The variety of meetings I have covered recent
ly have caused a bit of dizziness. Some random
thoughts on local government.
* * *
You can tell Jackson and Bar-
row counties are growing, and
you can tell that growth contin
ues up 1-85 as Commerce and
Banks County talk about poten
tial growth.
Braselton, and to a lesser extent
Jefferson, areas are showing the
effects of growth as folks begin
to talk about controlling, slowing
down, and, in some case, stop
ping some growth. The current
monster is the large distribution
centers that are much in the news.
Commerce, which wants to add to its tax digest, is
eager to add a distribution center.
I predict soon we’ll begin to hear folks talk about
restricting subdivisions and the size of houses.
Some people in Barrow County have been beating
the drums about “starter homes” for a few years.
Those of us with a few years can remember when
“starter homes” were under $100,000. Now the
price is more like $160,000 and the size may be
1,200 square feet. I remember a subdivision of a
couple of hundred homes that were built on pasture
land in Knox County, Tenn., in the early 1990s.
They were about 1,400 square feet and carried price
tags of about $130,000 to $150,000.
I thought that was outrageous.
Just a week or so ago, I heard a woman in a Com
merce meeting lamenting the traffic and crowded
conditions in Jefferson - and Commerce was begin
ning to get that way, also, she said. I asked her if she
had been to Atlanta lately. I could have said, “Have
you been on (Hwy.) 211 in front of Chateau Elan
about 7:15 a.m. or 5 p.m.?”
Less than a year ago, I heard three or four folks in
Banks County complain that a proposed apartment
complex would lead to traffic like the Atlanta area.
Not likely, but I understand their complaint.
I spent an afternoon last week with a long-time
buddy of mine, now retired, who lives in Shady
Valley. That is in upper, upper East Tennessee and
has only two-lane roads in it. He does not do email
and has no computer, much less the current fads of
Instagram and Snap Chat.
Looking at our newspapers - five in four counties
-1 have seen stories about economic development in
every area within the past two or three weeks. That
includes Madison County, which does not have an
interstate or Hwy. 316.
Jackson and Barrow counties are on the edge of
the Atlanta sprawl. That can be seen in the increas
ing construction of houses and increased traffic.
Local government bodies talk about the problems
and opportunities at most meetings.
* * *
Budgets, budgets, budget. My head swims from
looking at numbers - from school systems to city
councils.
Salaries are big items, of course. We have to pay
administrative folks who push all the paperwork and
answer phones and we have to pay teachers and first
responders.
At every level of government, the cost of health
insurance goes up yearly. School districts have dealt
with a heavy blow the last few years.
The state legislature decided about four or five
years ago that it would no longer pay the cost of
“non-classified” people. Those include bus drivers,
food cookers and servers and janitors.
With the upcoming budget, school districts will be
paying the full health insurance cost for those folks.
In many districts, maybe most, bus drivers or nutri
tion workers may be “working” for health benefits.
Those folks make little money, in most cases.
Charging them for insurance is not an easy or quick
decision.
Just finding bus drivers is a yearly challenge.
I have seen signs about hiring those folks near
Commerce, Jefferson. Jackson County and Barrow
County schools. I expect the only reason I haven’t
seen them for Banks and Madison counties is I hav
en’t been by schools in those counties lately.
* * *
That’s only two subjects. I haven’t touched on
utilities yet. Water and sewer lines are a constant
topic, and problem. In nearly all jurisdictions, you
hear those conversations.
Jefferson is planning a second reservoir for its
water supply - and it takes years. Homer would
like to have a backup well for its water supply,
in addition to buying water from Banks County.
Everything seems to be connected. The Mulberry
River, which winds through the Braselton area and
provides water for Winder, is also along some land
developers would like to build on - houses or com
mercial buildings or both. The Upper Oconee Basin
Water Authority - four counties including Barrow
and Jackson - is talking about its future water needs,
which may lead eventually to another reservoir.
’Nuff for now.
Ron Bridgeman is a reporter for Mainstreet
News. Send him email at ron@mainstreetnews.
com.
Spreading rumors about other boomers
Let’s look at a hypothetical situation. Let’s say
you grew up in Jackson County in or around Jef
ferson and it gets to be about 2050. Okay, I am
dead and gone, but you read that Jefferson has been
declared one of the ten deadliest cities to live in
Georgia.
The town where I spent about
the first 23 years of my life has
that distinction. College Park,
so named because many of the
streets are named after large uni
versities, is a suburb of southwest
Atlanta. I went with another con
tractor to look at a job there not
too long ago. When we left the
job site, I told him we were only
five minutes from the town where
I grew up and I wanted to ride
through it. The main business
district supposedly still exists.
I thought we would follow Vir
ginia Avenue, which was once the
“main drag” in front of the airport, and we would
come-out in College Park. Things have changed.
After about 20 minutes and a little embarrassment,
I gave-up on finding what was once my hometown.
All the homes I lived in while growing up were
devoured by a malignant growth known as the
Atlanta Airport. The sites where they existed are
all under runways or other airport facilities now.
But the town’s library, city hall, jail and fire station
were still there I was told. I didn’t expect to find the
first hardware store I ever did business with, but I
couldn’t find any of these places. We were pushed
for time and I had to abandon the search and head
toward the place I now call home.
A friend from Pendergrass recently found a book
in the Jefferson Public Library she thought I would
be interested in. Copyrighted in 2017, “Flight Path,”
by Hannah Palmer, is a woman’s search for her roots
beneath the world’s busiest airport. Mrs. Palmer was
a 1996 graduate of Forest Park High School. Forest
Park and College Park were like Pendergrass and
Talmo, only bigger.
At an upcoming 50 th high school class reunion
planned in September of the North Clayton High
School Class of 1968, I intend to present a brief
synopsis of this book to the people who attend the
gathering. I will introduce it by its actual title, as
well as another title: “The Story of Us.”
It wouldn’t be nearly as interesting to a person
who was not from that area, but to me it was fas
cinating. Most of Hannah’s early childhood was
spent at various residences in “Mountain View,”
whose charter was dissolved by the state legislature
in 1978 for various improprieties. As the airport
expanded, some of the houses where she lived were
moved to other locations, some were tom down and
some were burned as training exercises by the fire
department. She became obsessed with finding out
what happened to each one. The research took a
while, but the personal experience she shares as she
tells the story make it far more than just a lesson in
history and geography.
She shows a picture of her mother made in 1978
in front of one of the houses in her quest. I was
in my “biker” phase at that time and I spent a lot
of time with biker buddies who lived in Mountain
View. The entire neighborhood attended some of
their parties. Her mother looks incredibly familiar
in a picture on page 176.
I have been in touch with Hannah and hope to
meet her and her husband for lunch in the near
future. Her mother now lives in Tennessee, but
comes to visit them regularly. I hope to meet her too.
We may have already met.
Rumor has it that our English teacher from the
eleventh grade is going to attend our reunion in
September, although she has never attended one
before. She once said that I would never be capable
of anything more complicated than digging ditches.
I am going to have some of my articles from the
newspaper in the car, just in case she does attend. I
am going to select the ones that irritated the editor
most. That way, she will know I haven’t changed.
* * *
A couple of weeks ago while in Florida, we met
some people from Warner Robins. Only one was
a native of Houston County, the others were orig
inally from Alexandria, Louisiana. We were just
watching the waves and I wasn’t listening closely to
what was being said. But one of the girls asked the
woman sitting next to me, “So what did he ever do
with that building?” The woman replied, “He had it
tom-down after the shooting; he didn’t think anyone
would want it for anything.”
That got my interest. “Shooting?” I asked.
“Yes, remember about 10 years ago, a guy went
into a lawyer’s office in Alexandria and shot five
people? Two of them died and three survived. I was
one of the three that survived.”
She showed me a scar where a bullet had passed
through the side of her leg. She said she had another
scar, but she couldn’t show me that one. One of the
people who died was a postal worker delivering
mail.
Immediately, images of bullet-riddled bodies from
Columbine, Vegas, Parkland and other massacres
raced through my mind. I got a different perspective
on the gun thing while sitting at arms length from
someone who had actually been involved in a mul
tiple shooting.
But I thought back through it. one more time. That
gun didn’t load itself or pull its own trigger. If they
stopped the manufacture and sale of guns tomorrow
and began to confiscate them from anyone that
wasn’t military or law enforcement, I guesstimate
that in 30 years they might have collected half the
guns. I also considered how many people on both
sides that would be killed while they were trying to
take them.
Thanks for reading.
Mike Rector is a local contractor. He can be
reached at mikerector405@gmail.com.
Recalling Old
South racism
Dear Editor:
Mike Buffington, thank you for your editorial last week. I was
a history major before switching to Social Science Ed in college
and had some time to do some fairly in-depth study of the area
post-Civil War. It is lost on many people just how explicitly rac
ist this area was just a generation ago. The young people yelling
at the young black men and women integrating the schools are
in their 70s and 80s today. Little Ruby Bridges, the five-year-old
depicted in some of the most iconic desegregation pictures in
textbooks, is only in her 60s today. John Lewis is a sitting U.S.
Rep, after participating with Martin Luther King in so many of
the protests of the 60s.
I’m only 42 and still went to an unofficially all white elemen
tary school in South Georgia and many in my group left the
public schools when it came time for middle school and went to
the private “Christian” school that was founded around the same
year as the public schools were integrated. Even if much of the
outward racism became uncouth, there is a lingering resentment
I’ve heard for my whole life from fellow whites.
Finding nuggets of unrefined, unambiguous racism like that
ad from Gov. Talmadge (mentioned in last week’s column) is
something I think whites in the area never really see if they
didn’t live thru it. Whites are rightly embarrassed and want
to downplay it. want it to disappear and not discuss it. But
blacks in the area remember the real tragedies of the area vs.
the perceived slights of being forced to interact with humans
of other races.
I did think it was interesting the timing of your editorial and
Mike Rector’s column on the other side of the fold, an inter
action with a friend that thought it awful that a black person,
running for Governor, might find the Confederate Memorial
on Stone Mountain offensive. A little correlating history:
Governor Eugene Talmadge — the same governor who ran
a full page ad in 1946 in The Herald proclaiming, “Our Last
Chance For WHITE SUPREMACY” had the state form the
“Stone Mountain Memorial Association” in 1941 with the
purpose to complete the memorial, only to be thwarted by the
demands on WWII. To have Stone Mountain cited, with Gov.
Talmadge’s words a page before in bold letters, was quite an
interesting juxtaposition.
As for Stone Mountain, the origins of that carving has a
firm foundation in the myth of the Lost Cause. It was begun
decades after the Civil War, but directly after the founding of
the second KKK upon that same mountain. A real monument
to the soldiers of that era might include, for example, actual
Georgia troops. Common men. Georgians. Instead, we have
Kentucky politician Jefferson Davis, and two generals — nei
ther of which are from Georgia.
I know the laser show on the mountain tries to fix the his
tory with a broken sword, but the carving itself is 100 percent
defiant men bestrode on horseback like conquering heroes.
These rich men were on the wrong side of a horrible history
of enslaving hundreds of thousands of people in order to prop
up an economic system that made those same men rich while
poorer whites stayed poor, pitted against the free labor they
could not compete against.
A memorial to the men that fought and died, convinced by
the leaders of the time of a cause that was never really theirs,
could serve as a reminder to question our leaders. It could have
been a memorial to the lives taken from their home on another
continent and used for generations as tortured laborers. If it
needed to be a military leader, it could have been some of the
many southern military men that stayed true to the Union,
or Gainesville native General Longstreet who after the war
regretted his actions and ended up leading a black regiment
against a white paramilitary mob set to throw out the recon
struction era Louisiana legislature in New Orleans. There are
many ways to honor the dead of that war without the propa
ganda of Lee, Davis and Jackson. None of those are depicted
on Stone Mountain.
That said, yes candidate Stacey Abrams does find the
monument offensive. Place yourself in her shoes, knowing
its history, and tell me you wouldn’t. However. I’ve seen her
speak three times recently, to very liberal crowds that I would
guess don’t care at all about preserving the Stone Mountain
carvings. Guess how many times that has come up as a priority
for her? Zero.
I suspect we will hear this line over and over as a scare tactic
when her real priorities are health care, education, infrastruc
ture and employment — not necessarily in that order.
What is or isn’t on Stone Mountain isn’t the most pressing
issue for the citizens of Georgia, regardless of race. Knowing
you can get treatment for health issues without bankrupting
you is a much larger issue in all of our lives. That’s what Dem
ocrats are fighting for here.
Sincerely,
Pete Fuller
Jefferson
Burning the house down
Dear Editor:
I would like to expand on the “removing raccoons from the
basement” analogy from last week in Mike Rector’s column.
Let’s suppose you don’t do your homework. Perhaps you
have a beautiful daughter. You hire a feckless dotard to get rid
of the raccoons and pay his ridiculous fee. In addition to the
bad hair and the plumbers crack, he is also a draft dodger, he
thinks POWs are losers, he mocks people less fortunate than
himself, he gives Gold Star widows and mothers a hard time.
And when he shows up, your daughter is home alone and he
assaults her because he feels entitled. Then let’s say he bums
down your house. Hey, he kept his promise, the raccoons are
gone. Are you tired of winning?
I could tolerate the bad hair and fake tan. Nobody agrees
on everything. Maybe you didn’t know how bad 45 would be,
everybody makes mistakes. The house is burning and you still
support him? You still believe President Obama is going to
take your guns? Admit your mistakes or we all suffer. I would
prefer someone with integrity, honor, honesty, a gentleman and
scholar, regardless of sex or race.
The loser you hired doesn’t care what he destroys if he can
make money. He will take the money and not apologize for the
destruction of the environment, or the education system, or the
hungry children, or the health care system. When is he going
to do his secret plan to stop the war and fix the infrastructure?
Sooner or later you will have to admit you are wrong. Rex
Tillerson was right.
Sincerely,
Richard Plach