Wednesday, November 14, 2001
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Wednesday, November 14, 2001 |
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Why I'm voting for Steve Brown and Murray Weed next Tues. By CAL BEVERLY Local elections are the closest thing we have to a community conversation, and next Tuesday is the last chance for voters in Peachtree City to have their say on what happens in the next two years within their little 15,000-acre plot. Four folks are offering their services to the public in two runoff races for City Council, four individuals who contend they have the wisdom, knowledge and skills to be our representatives. My votes will go for the two best equipped to act on our behalf: For mayor: Steve Brown. For Council: Murray Weed. Now here's why I am not voting for the opponents, Gary Rower and Carol Fritz: They won't listen to you. Rower and Fritz just don't listen very well. They exhibit a profound deafness to the voice of the people. They seem to hear only what their handlers spoon-feed them (in Rower's case) or what some "expert" tells them (in Fritz's case). Occasionally the people's clamor rises to an un-ignorable level as it did in the West Village annexation issue. In that case, Fritz and fellow annexation proponents got peevish, angered that anyone would question the Olympian wisdom of jamming another 6,000 to 8,000 people into the city's traffic-choked west side. Rower, on the other hand, wasn't present (he has mostly been not present at many city government meetings prior to his mayoral announcement) at the Council meeting in early 2000 when Brown pleaded with the members to adopt his proposed big-box limitation ordinance or something like it. So Rower in his flyers spouts misinformation from his handlers that Councilwoman Annie McMenamin, not Brown, came up with the big box rule. Well, DUH. She was on Council; Brown was not. She took Brown's idea and formalized it and introduced it as an ordinance. Rower didn't even take the time to research the Council minutes to discover his misinformation, as pointed out by columnist Amy Riley on Page 4A. It took an average working-guy citizen, Steve Brown, not a member of council or city planning staff, to come up with an ordinance that should have been thought up and passed by the powers-that-be several years ago. But there has not been much original thinking on the city councils of the past 10 years just a lot of scrambling, after-the-fact, stuttering reactions to situations that should have been foreseen years ago. Better legal advice and better planning and some attentive thinkers on Council could have saved us citizens a lot of grief. Now, Fritz and Rower and their establishment power structure criticize Brown and others who question the dullards and the status quo as being "divisive." You know, democracy real, grassroots, American democracy tends to be messy, discomfiting, even divisive. Otherwise, we would have a one-party system, not two or more. And in Peachtree City for the past couple of years, we have had an open display of pure American democracy at work raising issues, questioning officials, demanding answers and refusing to be bullied. Fritz has been on the opposing side of that display, not liking it and not liking the people who disagreed with her. And Rower seems bent on perpetuating the same, old, tired, non-planning, reactive mode that the councils of the past decade have employed the same good old boys, doing the same good old boy things, and somehow expecting that our massive new problems will be solved by everybody just getting along. If Fritz and Rower and the good-old-boy-power structure have their way, everybody will just shut up and do what they're told, and think what they're told to think, and stop making waves, and stop rocking the boat. Well, I think otherwise. It's way past time to rattle some cages and shake some city officials out of a two-decade dependence on the developers' largesse. It's time for Peachtree City to grow up, stop talking about a "master plan" that was outdated and declared bankrupt 30 years ago, and start solving some very practical, mature city problems like roads and traffic. Brown and Weed will provide the fresh start, the fresh thinking and most of all the attentive listening that we need. That's why I'm voting for Steve Brown for mayor and Murray Weed for city council.
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