Thursday, October 22

The Blind Leading The Blind In Hardin County

Amended Readers Write Submission to The Courier for October 21, 2009

The article on the front page of The Courier a couple of weeks ago about the County Commissions’ refusal to pass a simple housekeeping resolution calling for an election as the result of a successfully filed and certified petition, concerned me because I didn’t get to attend the ‘special called meeting’ due to a prior commitment and didn't get to observe these folks in action.

I have since listened to the audio recording of that meeting several times and intend to have it transcribed and certified as part of the "that’s just the way we do it in Hardin County" history. It’s a classic, no kidding.

The Notice of the special meeting was called by Mayor Davis to direct the election commission to conduct an election. The statutes clearly mandate that "no other business but that embraced in the call shall be transacted during the sitting of the special term."

I have said for year that if you want to see the simplest of tasks really messed-up, just let Mayor Davis exercise his leadership skill set as Chairmen of the Hardin County Board of County Commissioners and then watch some of the Commissioners follow him right out of bounds.

The recent "special meeting" of the County Commission, aka our Local Legislative Body, is just the latest example the Mayor’s leadership skill set and his general lack of knowledge of the statutes resulting in several violations of state statutes and local ordinances, again.

Thank goodness the general assembly seems to have anticipated this obstructionist type of action on the part of the local legislative body and wrote into the law that if the local legislative body doesn’t act on the request for the election within 30 days of certification, the petition becomes the required resolution for the election commission to hold the election within a given time frame.

Remember that "no other business" thing, mandated by the Tennessee statutes.

Instead - The Mayor had a better idea:

Mayor Davis: "Commissioners, I would inform you , tonight we are here to talk about the debt, the funding, how are we going to fund the debt, is really what the issue is at hand. Other issues as far as regards to schools are behind us but the debt the county has incurred 30 million dollars is before us and that’s what we are here to talk about. How do we fund it, if we rescind the 1cent sales tax or use other revenues."

Commissioner Jerrolds: I disagree with you. You said we were here to discuss how we are going to fund this, we’re here because a petition signed by enough registered voter of this county to caused an election to rescind this tax. That’s why were here.

[Commissioner Jerrolds was right on, but the County Attorney still cleared a motion to not rescind the one-cent sales tax and twelve of the Commissioners present followed the attorney and mayor right out of bounds.]
What we appear to have is an ill informed County Mayor, enabled by an uninformed County Attorney, who mis-informed the mostly unprepared and confused Board of County Commissioners.