Wednesday, July 24, 2002

Meredith is on vacation this week and will be back Monday. Last week we counted three more letters attacking the Mike Wheat campaign. That brings the total to seven attack letters from our opponent over the last three weeks and no letters on issues important to our county.

We plan to continue highlighting our positions right up to the election. Our issue this week is preserving the history of Fayette County.

Our county is rich in history and historical assets, from the Kenwood area in the north end of the county to Fayetteville's Main Street buildings to the Starr's Mill area in the south end of the county.

Our heritage includes the Holliday house (Doc Holliday's uncle's home), two rooms of which served as the first classrooms in the county. Fayetteville City Hall is a refurbished 1930s-era school building and is on the site of the first school built in the county in the late 1800s. And there are stories of Civil War skirmishes in the Whitewater Creek area and buried Confederate gold. All that is to say we have a history worth preserving.

I am a big fan of Main Street Fayetteville, a public-private partnership whose goal is to create a sense of community and to help downtown businesses. Under the Main Street program, the Hollingsworth House and the Holliday-Fife House both were preserved as assets for our county.

I know the city had hoped to preserve the old Dorsey House as well, but my opponent ordered it razed. Both of these old homes now serve our county as gathering places. As Dave Hamrick wrote in a July 1998 editorial about the Main Street program, "I'm betting that most of you like seeing your town turned into a crown jewel for the south side of Atlanta. I'm betting you like the fact that when strangers drive through town, increasingly they're likely to remark, 'What a nice community.'"

As your county commissioner I will work to improve the level of participation by the county in this program. I also believe we need to inventory our historical assets from Tyrone to Kenwood to Peachtree City to Starr's Mill. Once inventoried, these historical assets clearly must become a part of both the countywide passive recreation infrastructure and the economic development efforts. These historical assets offer our community great benefits for not much more than the cost of cooperation.

Mike Wheat

Candidate for County Commission, Post 5

Republican Primary, Aug. 20

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