Building Castles in the Sky...A Bureaucrat’s Dream

Our Commissioners are again seriously considering funding themselves a new Administration Building.

This column presents a conservative viewpoint about items of interest in our community and our lives. Focus is on items impacting your pocket book, your personal freedoms, and your rights. I hope you will read the column regularly and it occasionally influences your opinions and actions.


If you are a Jackson County Taxpayer and you consider yourself a fiscal conservative, then you need to join in an effort to stop a proposal which will come to the forefront at the next County Commission meeting, which is set for January 12. We have some “home grown pork” which the commissioners are considering for enactment. The costs for this example of local pork legislation will be paid by you and your children, if the Commission approves funding for the proposed new county administration building project. The actual cost of the structure is currently being reevaluated, but I feel it will cost between $15,000,000 and $20,000,000 to build in its current location and design. In my opinion, this action would be excessive, unnecessary, wasteful, and inappropriate, especially at this time in this uncertain economy.

I view this project as a self serving, “porkish” proposal being made by some of our county’s leaders at a time when many of the citizens of Jackson County are struggling to pay power bills and put food on the table. Of course, if you have always been in some secure, “fat cat’ bureaucratic position living from government checks, and have never had to worry about really earning a living in the real world….you would not appreciate the reality of the struggles some families are facing.

There is a group organizing to appear at the January 12 meeting to voice “support” for building the new facility. They are the bureaucrats who wish to sit in a shiny, new, expensive office and look out their windows over downtown Marianna. These “crats” are being joined by a few merchants organized by “Main Street Marianna” who fear that their businesses would be somehow injured if the administration building was located a few blocks away at one of the existing vacant shopping center buildings. In my opinion they, too, are self serving, and have no regard for the wastefulness of the venture or the burden it would impose on all others who reside in Jackson County.

I feel the relocation of the county admin functions to a location a few blocks away would have a negligible impact on downtown commerce. In fact, the lessening of strain on available parking in the downtown area could result in more people deciding to venture there for lunch and perhaps shopping there instead of rushing out to Malloyville, where there is plenty of parking space. These downtown merchants may be working against their own best interest by backing an action which would worsen the downtown parking situation.

The commissioners are currently going through the “smoke and mirrors” routine of having an “unbiased comparison” of the options of building the new downtown three story structure, vs. remodeling of the old Wal Mart facility prepared by Ajax Construction, the company which would do the work, in either case. I feel this comparison should be made by a totally uninvolved third party, not the company which has more to gain by the more expensive project. It is like asking a car dealer to do a study to see what you should buy from him, a $30,000 new car or a $10,000 used car.

Other county and municipal governments in Florida and neighboring states have renovated existing empty retail space for government buildings. The costs of these renovations, the satisfaction of the involved employees and the public, and the suitability of the renovated spaces should be included in any meaningful study which is made to help our Commission evaluate this decision. You can bet a representative sampling of these comparisons will not be included in this study. They will most likely paint a “worse possible” scenario to enhance the option to build new space.

Personally, my advice to the Commissioners at this time is….WAIT! I feel the best course of action at this time is no action at all. Those who want the building and those who oppose the building can argue the issues at another moment in time. Other financing opportunities will come along, so the existing loan proposal should not be pursued now. To undertake a new major project for the county,…during the middle of the most severe recession since the depression combined with the uncertainties which exist within our nation’s sputtering, sagging economy, and the potential for international economic melt down,…would be an ill conceived decision. Now is no time to be considering encumbering our citizens with a new long term debt.

If you feel this project is a bad idea, and the Commissioners should not proceed with a new admin building construction project….then you need to come to the Commission meeting and be prepared to take part in the dialogue. In the meantime, you can be contacting your commissioner and voicing your feelings prior to the public meeting on January 12 at 9:00 AM.

Rudiments: Odds and Ends Worth Mentioning-

● In this time of national economic peril we need Patriots, not Politicians. The methods which were used to pass the Health Plan in the Senate was a great example of the dirty politics and self serving tactics which are commonplace in Washington, and to a lesser degree at the State and local levels. I say it is time to oust them all, and regain control of both parties by filling their spaces with patriotic, conservative, ethical, and moral citizens who will put the good of the nation ahead of actions which only favor them personally or only benefit their constituencies. ‘Bringing home the pork for the folks back home”, is a wasteful, worn philosophy which has no place in today’s struggle for national economic survival. Patriotic citizens should neither support nor encourage this type of political thinking.

● I wish you all a wonderful 2010, and a great new decade. I resolve during the coming year to say at least one nice thing in my column each week, no matter how hard it is to find.

Note: The opinions stated in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Hatcher Publications.