Wednesday, January 7, 2004

Looking back, looking ahead in Fayette

By CAL BEVERLY
editor@thecitizennews.com

Well, has the sky fallen on Peachtree City with the messy divorce of the Development Authority and its venues? Well, no, and no such celestial calamities are likely to befall the fair city of the West in the year ahead.

But, calamities await, and they slouch toward us from the mid-east (the middle eastern part of the county, that is).

So, just for fun, let’s look back and ahead on Fayette.

The long-time power brokers of Peachtree City lost their final official toehold in the governing of the manufactured city with the unceremonious rout of the DAPC. But, two newly-elected newcomers to the ruling City Council may alter the tone if not the tenor of debate in the Cart Path Capital.

A Free-Speecher brought up the remarkable point: The city staff managed to create a balanced budget for the tennis center and amphitheater within a month of the handoff, whereas the hapless DAPC couldn’t manage that in a decade of stumbling from one deficit to the next.

Look for the two venues to fade out of the political spotlight and into well-managed usage. Look for the DAPC to just fade, period. As things stand now, the county development authority gets first crack at all new industry, and it’s well financed to boot, without any special motel-hotel tax income. Plus the county group concentrates on attracting new industry, rather than old rock and roll acts and under-Top-100 tennis players.

Mayor Steve Brown, having sunk into deficit spending on his available political capital, will take a lower-key approach to things public, though his complaints will still be heard about Coweta County development along the new TDK Boulevard extension.

The problem with being a gadfly mayor is that people who can get things done start going around the gadfly and getting things done anyway. A gadfly must take care that he doesn’t become politically irrelevant, though still buzzing loudly.

Under-16 cart drivers will reappear on PTC cart paths, to the delight of proponents of PTC’s “lifestyle,” to the horror of many threatened cart path users and to the measurable detriment of public safety in general.

We’ll lose a good, conservative workhorse congressman in Mac Collins, who’ll get beat in the U.S. Senate race by country-club Republican money, and we’ll gain a novice representative. The only way he will rise above freshman obscurity is if the voters send a young black Republican named Dylan Glenn to Washington. Now that would get some notice.

The 34-year-old, whose column appears on this page, has served Gov. Sonny Perdue as assistant chief of staff and President Bush as a White House staffer. His mother lives in Peachtree City, his dad in Columbus and he has his campaign office in Newnan. Watch this extremely bright and articulate young man. Could he be the next J.C. Watts, but with a Fayette connection?

And what about this mid-east calamity?

The people you should fear the most for the loss of Fayette County’s unique lifestyle are the low-profile mayor and council members of the city of Fayetteville.

Given the state’s current laissez-faire annexation laws, a tiny city bent upon expansion in a county with strict zoning controls can gobble up just about every rural mile within the county borders.

The resulting city sewer service offers commercial and housing densities currently unimaginable to most who pass through the green midlands of Fayette.

Get ready: Absent limits imposed by a change in state law, Fayetteville’s council is poised to become the central driving force in paving rural Fayette as part of their Greater Fayetteville design.

Developers, you have a lot of friends at Fayetteville City Hall.

Rest of county: Fayetteville’s council yearns to put in parking lots and shopping centers and dense development to be your very closest neighbor. Watch out.

But, hey, what’s good for Fayetteville MUST be good for the rest of the county. So much so that the rest of the county faces becoming just another part of Fayetteville.

What can you do? Fayetteville voters are so happy with their council that less than 8 percent of them went to the polls in November, and two of the three seats were uncontested. Don’t look to Fayetteville voters for rescue from the surging tide of annexation.

Instead, find out who your state legislators are. Ask them to put some limits on Fayetteville’s expansion ambitions. Freeze the city into its current shape and land size. Let all of Fayetteville’s development occur within its already ample borders. (There are several empty big boxes available for development, if anybody is looking for building space.)

And pray that Fayetteville’s council will learn the meaning of the simple word: “Enough.”