May 24, 2007
By: Sid Riley
This column presents a non-partisan, conservative viewpoint about items of interest in our community and our lives. Focus is on items that are impacting your pocket book, your personal freedoms, and your rights. I hope that you will read the column regularly and that it occasionally influences your opinions and actions. Now, on to the subject of the week::
"It appears that a serious construction defect has occurred in our county court house over the past thirty years!"
Amazingly, even though the structure looks sturdy enough (although it is ugly), it appears that every room in every county department has been shrinking steadily over the past thirty years! It is astounding that brick and mortar could shrink in size!
In 1977, thirty short years ago the courthouse structure easily housed all of our county functions. This included the sheriff’s offices (including jail management), the supervisor of elections, the public defender, prosecutors, and all judicial functions, the property appraiser, the tax collector, the court clerk, county administration and the commissioner’s meeting room. Then the building began to shrink!
This phenomena continued at a gradual rate until today there is no longer room inside the court house for the sheriff, the supervisor of elections, the public defenders group, the county administration, or the commissioner’s meeting room. There is barely enough room remaining in this shrunken structure for the judicial functions, the court clerk, the tax collector and the property appraiser. It is amazing!
These functions that were expelled from the courthouse have been forced to find other suitable housing in most of the buildings that once housed businesses around the court house square and now house bureaucratic functions. Never fear, the bureaucracy has now developed a solution to this dilemma.
They are going to build several new buildings within sight of the courthouse so that the various species of expelled "crats" can again be comfortably clustered in the same building. They have already obtained a large building for the sheriff’s gang (the old coke bottling plant), and the fire and rescue group has several buildings, so all they now need to do is build a new, costly building for county administration, and a new facility for our new Emergency Response function.
I’ll bet you that after they have moved into these new buildings that we are slated to pay for, they too will begin to shrink! And in another twenty five years our children and grand children will be forced to build even more buildings for this fast breeding flock of bureaucrats.
I believe that a better solution would be to first stop the growth of the local bureaucracy. We would even strive to reduce it significantly by removing the requirements and functions that the public does not really need in order to survive. Then I would consider approaches that would provide suitable consolidated housing with a minimum of cost and new construction.
Some possible alternatives worth consideration are:
- Renovate and remodel the old Marianna High School structures to serve as the new consolidated County Administration Complex. The school theater area would make a great Commission Meeting Room. In today’s era of electronic communication there is no need for the county functions to be located near the Court functions or the Clerk of the Court offices.
- The existing Court House would be dedicated to court activities, housing the public defenders, the prosecutors, the Court Clerk, and the Judges.
- The new Emergency Response function could be located in the school complex, or the annex building on Highway 90 that now houses the code-a- crats.
This approach would solve the space problems and would save millions of tax dollars. Let’s see if our Commissioners are really looking out for our interest. If they vote to build and spend, then I don’t think they will be "Getting It Right". If they vote to erect, we should not vote to elect!
ODDS AND ENDS – RUDIMENTS: Current Items Worthy of Note
- The new $.41 cent stamp is out! This new and better stamp is well worth the money (I think?) I heard that the postal system plans to use the extra revenues to buy 300,000 new "NEXT WINDOW PLEASE" signs!
- Work continues on widening the bridge at the mill pond. This is the seventeenth month of this twelve month job. Please don’t forget to honk when you drive by them, it helps them stay awake.
- The city is well underway with the work on Water Street (Kelson Ave.). The project is being funded by the "road tax" that is included in every water bill city residents pay.
- In my opinion the Public Health building project should be delayed until we know the outcome of the new hospital referendum in August. Otherwise there is a good chance that our tax money will be wasted on new construction when good space at the existing hospital complex would have been available.
- Remember the statement that rings of truth – "More government isn’t the solution to the problem….more government is the cause of the problem!"
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