Wednesday, February 19, 2003
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Wednesday, February 19, 2003 |
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Terror, dredging, annexing, changing spots
By CAL BEVERLY Small talk on this and that, for what it's worth ... Terror alert In this issue, we present some local reporting on sensible preparations being taken by city and county agencies in view of the recent heightened terror alert. Yes, I did buy some duct tape, but mainly because I was down to one roll of the irreplaceable stuff, having used it for innumerable home, office and car repairs. As my colleague Sallie Satterthwaite has counseled, no one should be without a can of WD-40 and a roll of duct tape, no matter your station in life. And, I might add, no matter the level of terror alerts. The plastic sheeting I found to be extraneous. Why not just omit the sheets over your windows and doors and just duct-tape the crevices instead? You use about the same amount of tape either way. One big item we wanted to cover was kids in schools. If something happens nearby during the school day, the first instinct of most parents is to rush to pick up their children from the schools. Probably not a good idea. As we have discovered, schools are pretty safe places to be, and all have emergency plans in place. We published in Friday's papers some common-sense preparations any family should consider. We are reprinting that full page, courtesy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in this issue. Fayetteville's new annexation You have to hand it to our Fayetteville Council members: If you like bigger and bigger growth, these guys are the county champs. Yet another annexation, yet more commercial and high-density residential acreage, this time on the city's south side. Leave these guys in office and Fayetteville will swallow up much of what's left of unincorporated Fayette County. I suspect the council would love to get their developing hands on that big pasture just west of the hospital on Ga. Highway 54. They probably think all that wasted open space could be put to much more profitable use as big box parking lots. Just about everything that goes into these new chain-store developments is bad for locally owned retail businesses. They suck out boxcar loads of local money, pay low wages and send massive profits off to other states. Except for the taxes, that is. They pay big taxes to Fayetteville, enabling the municipal empire builders to expand their eat-the-whole-thing philosophy. Strange, though, the new taxes never seem to solve the traffic woes or deter the increased crime brought on by the empire builders' grand plans. Dredging Lake Peachtree The Fayette County Commission seems bent on being penny-wise, at the expense of a big source of our drinking water. With money already set aside, the commission should pay for floating a barge on the lake and dredging it while retaining use of the lake for supplying our faucets. Instead, they may choose to drain the lake, leaving it dry for many months, shutting down the use of that lake and Lake Kedron for drinking water intake, at a time of prolonged drought and uncertain events in the war on terror. All this for a "savings" of a little less than $200,000. Somebody needs to throw some cold lake water in the commissioners' faces to wake them up to the public safety needs of the county. Changing our stripes? We heard from some that this curmudgeonly editor is starting to shed his conservative wolf's skin and is beginning to bare his true sheepish liberal ways. Ha! I mean, we publish letters brutally opposing the current mayor of Peachtree City, to whom (to some) we are joined at the hip. So which is it? Are we fer, or a-gin'? Well, both. Fer, when the official is right (in our humble opinion). A-gin', when the official is behaving stupidly. But always, always, these pages are open to opposition viewpoints. If you are on the inside, the outsiders are going to pummel you on these pages. These same pages are open to the insiders as well, but many rarely feel the need to communicate with their subjects through this medium. We print what we get. If an official suffers the slings and arrows of outraged citizens in official silence, nobody's to blame for that silence but the official. American politics has often been about the Ins and the Outs. The Ins have the power; the Outs have these pages. Witness our lead letter this week. I enjoy reading Timothy Parker's missives, although I rarely agree with either his premises or his conclusions. But his is Loyal Opposition, and he argues his point with passion and intelligence. This editor-publisher espouses mostly conservative-libertarian-liberal-radical viewpoints, and at this late stage, is unlikely to change his spotty skin now. On our 10th anniversary So, The Citizen survived the first decade. And we're still around. Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ. And see us through the next 10. Amen.
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