Where There Is Smoke There Is Fire: Part 1

Chamber Missed Some Important Lessons Learned

As we have experienced when the wind shifts, where there is smoke their is fire. We actually went to a code red air quality alert because of peat burning more than a hundred miles away. For more than two weeks the smoke has been coming in to the Lee Dispatch on the desperate effort to cover up the responsibility of the Lee County Commissioners in regard to the failure of the sales tax and lack of the Commissioner's official endorsement of a plan to renovate Lee County High School. Enough people have had enough conversations that couple with our own digging to sort out what is going on. Since there is enough for a novel, this will be our series. Posts will be tied together with links to help keep it readable.

What we learned from the failure of the sales tax is that the commissioners were complacent and assumed it would pass:

• We now know that the county's capital improvement plan was put together with the assumption the tax would pass. Only a few people who asked to see the plan ever saw it. There was no alternative for the sales tax not passing. Why didn't the commissioners widely publicize the plan which had Lee County High School's funding in it?
  
• The commissioners printed one brochure on the plan and never reached out to get a community effort started. The Fair Tax Committee was an out-growth of a meeting asked for by the Board of Education that set up a joint committee. Were it not for the Board of Education there would have been no last minute organization to push for its passage.
  
• When Jerry Lemmond reported his "keeping track" of public comments, he only reported those for and against. (Click here to see post) It was overwhelmingly positive, but he wasn't listening to the "only if for Lee County High School' part. He got that conversion during the election. (Click here to see post)
  
• After seeing Bob Brown lose, he and other commissioners got religion. After all, three of the four Republican candidates had taken strong pro-Lee High School positions. Immediately after the election, calls started going out of the courthouse (including one to Bob Joyce) and conversations started between commissioners floating a plan to combine another vote on the sales tax in November with a bond vote on the high school. The plan never got off the ground. Neighboring Moore County had passed a large bond issue in November only to see the sales tax go down in flames in May. Commissioners Lemmond and Paschal decided a vote would actually hurt them in the fall. The idea evaporated.
• Time for Plan B--Blame it on the school board in the next post.