Comatose in Fville, dueling mayors in PTC

The local political season is upon us, and Im scratching my pointed head.

Fayetteville has three seats to be decided, but only one contested race. Last Fayetteville election, fewer than 8 percent of the citys registered voters bothered to cast ballots.

Around the office, the talk is that Fayetteville voters are one of three things: happy beyond belief, too busy to be bothered with a small thing like representative democracy, or collectively comatose.

For the busy and comatose voters, no need to concern yourselves. The current council knows just what your city should become and wont bother you with the messy details until they are done. Rush on, sleep on.

Tyrone elections promise to be more than a formality this fall. Over there, unlike Fayetteville, there are some voters awake, and a lot of them are unhappy with the Town Council.

A real public debate is occurring about what kind of place Tyrone is and should become. Thats the same debate that could be going on in Fayetteville, but the other 93 percent of voters have better things to do.

Peachtree City voters will choose among 11 candidates for three council slots, including mayor.

The mayoral race seems to have devolved into a referendum about the citys Development Authority and its million-dollar tennis center debt.

Documents from the lawsuit between the DAPC, Peachtree National Bank, and the City Council has turned up some interesting revelations, as detailed last week in a letter to the editor from Mayor Steve Brown.

I checked some lawsuit documents, and it seems that three members of the DAPC board were also members of the lending banks board of directors, the same bank that lent the million to the DAPC.

The time frame is unclear, as detailed in a front page story in this issue.

Unfortunately, there are no official DAPC minutes recorded about that seemingly crucial detail.

One of the dual board members commented that loans and such were casual affairs because the DAPC and the City Council were not in an adversarial relationship in those days.

Indeed, the two bodies were quite schmoozy and little things like accurate governmental minutes about hundreds of thousands of dollars in borrowed money were just overlooked, all in the spirit of community good will, you understand.

Its telling that the only defense that can be made for this glaring omission is that the ones who served in those dual capacities (members of the board of both the DAPC and the lending bank) were also community leaders who had only the best interests of the community at heart.

Gee, youd think that community leaders would recognize potential conflicts of interest and the need for accurate public records of big financial transactions, wouldnt you? Well, maybe not in Peachtree City.

You can read the latest on the ongoing DAPC saga of a decade of invisible record-keeping and the continuing debate between the dueling mayors, Brown and Lenox, in these pages.

At this point, I think it would be charitable to suggest that the best former Mayor Bob Lenox, a DAPC champion, can do at this point is to change the subject.

Development Authority

Submitted by scruffy on Tue, 10/25/2005 - 2:04pm.

Yes, there was a lot of talking about this at the Rotary forum. Problem is none of those talking - including Brown - can actually do anything about it. It has reached the lawsuit stage. The court will decide, the city and the new mayor will have no choice other than to obey.

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Dueling Mayors

Submitted by pattiadams on Wed, 10/19/2005 - 9:59am.

Cal relishes documents that might prove those nasty bankers in Peachtree City might not have kept notes. Thumb screws!

9 of 10 political candidates at the Forum supported paying City bills due. Mayor Brown nearly popped a blood vessel yelling at the unwashed masses and waving his attorney's opinions not to pay. How could we be so ignorant?? and what will this teach our children???

I see a future job for Steve Brown as a Reporter for the Citizen. The message sounds the same.

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