Hating candidates and ignoring the obvious

On the occasion of my first-ever “blog” I’d like to congratulate every candidate who has put his and her heads on the public chopping block.

Even the most campaign-hardened candidate must reel in dismay at times from the verbal assaults that come their way.

Sometimes the assaults have some basis in fact, but often it’s just unmitigated personal dislike, even hatred.

Peachtree City Mayor Steve Brown is likely the most hated local candidate I’ve seen in more than 30 years. I can recall one more hated in nearby Griffin from three decades ago, but he is likely long dead and immune to our opinions.

The raw hatred of Brown by his opponents reflects most badly on those very opponents. There is just no justifiable reason for such public and private displays of bad manners and bad mouthing.

No lives are at stake here. No nation is going to war as a result of one PTC mayor’s decisions. The whole anti-Brown campaign is just ugly, ugly, ugly.

Is Brown so virtuous? No, he is a mouthy public figure in his own right, but he generally starts at some public policy position, rather than from a starting point of personal hatred.

Is he right often? That’s the rub: About the issues he has caught the most flak about, he generally is correct in his initial positions.

His mistakes have come from his too-ready mouth doing battle with other personalities.

Let’s review just one issue to begin with.

The Tennis Center and the old Development Authority of Peachtree City: Brown was right to blow the whistle on both.

The only defense of the old DAPC now amounts to this: They were a bunch of good old boys just trying to do good for the community. And the good old boys gave us a “world-class” tennis center. Let’s examine those two arguments.

Those community leaders ran the old DAPC out of their back pockets. They kept precious few records, despite being required to by state law. Several of them served on the board of directors of either a lending bank or a bidding contractor.

Assuming the absolute best of motives, the board did a bush-league job of keeping financial records and meeting minutes, despite knowing they should do better. If they had performed the same way on their day jobs, they would have been justifiably terminated.

There is no recorded vote on more than a million dollars in loans to the DAPC. There’s no paperwork financial trail to determine where that money went.

How can any reasonable person praise this old board? Their motives alone just don’t cut it.

So far, every person who wants the old way to return simply glosses over the very real failings of this old DAPC.

Folks, such glossing over the plain facts represents either stupidity or plain willful blindness to painfully obvious failures. Please, get some clues as to how real life and real business and real government is supposed to operate.

I have printed letters and Free Speech items lamenting the overthrow of the old DAPC. I have to wonder how otherwise supposedly intelligent people can be so ignorant of the facts clearly in front of them.

The good old boys’ motives are irrelevant — I repeat, irrelevant — in light of their patently obvious ineptness in running a governmental entity responsible to state law and the taxpayers.

They may be and may have been great individuals personally who excelled in business and other private ventures. But only an extremely foolish person would defend their record-keeping and financial astuteness in overseeing a public entity. Peachtree City government is well rid of the old DAPC.

And by the way, who asked for a world-class tennis center? Six hundred elite tennis club members? I never got to vote on that expenditure, and neither did you. That was decided in good old boy fashion.

The city had several decent public tennis courts before that center was dreamed of. I used to smack a few racquets at Pebblepocket and Glenloch before my belly began hiding my feet. The city would do well to spend some money keeping those facilities up to minimum standards instead of providing a publicly-financed exclusive country club for the elite few and some traveling tournaments.

If you argue in favor of the old DAPC, at least address the conflicts of interest, the abysmal record-keeping and the lack of minutes of supposedly public votes on more than a million dollars in loans. Have the intellectual honesty to address the obvious problems.

Should PTC taxpayers pay off those loans to the DAPC?

Five of the six mayoral candidates raise the “moral” issue and say, “Yes, we should.”

First of all, explain what you mean by “moral.”

If we want to start doing the “moral” thing in government, I have a few places to start before we get to a tennis center.

In view of our tight financial situation, please address how you will pay for a “moral” obligation.

Will you raise taxes? Will you float a “bricks and mortar” loan, obligating tax revenues for years into the future? Will you ask the city voters to approve a bond referendum to repay the loan, which will also raise taxes? Will you cut city staff or city-funded programs already in place to provide the necessary pay-back funds?

How will you pay back this “moral” obligation?

Way back when, I wrote a column that said, Yes, the loan should be repaid. But I think it should be repaid by the new DAPC, using part of the hotel-motel tax receipts, the funding mechanism originally envisioned to pay off the debt.

Will it take a long time? Yes, probably. The banks, which should have sought better record-keeping and more due diligence at the time they made the loans, should take what they can get. Maybe their current boards of directors will be a little more careful about potential conflicts of interest in the future.

And maybe Peachtree City government, including its authorities, will get more real about the differences between necessities and luxuries. We can but hope ...