A funny thing happened on the way to the forum, Part II: Not in 3D
May 5th, 2008, 3:28 pm · Post a Comment · posted by madisontaylor
Post-mortems, Post Toasties and post-hypnotic suggestions after digesting the print, video and audio from Tuesday’s forum of candidates for the Alamance County Board of Commissioners which was held at the Paramount Theater in beautiful but otherwise deserted-at-night downtown Burlington.
Maybe a margarita from the nearby Mi Casa restaurant would’ve helped.
Welllll … probably not.
So who won?
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Since it wasn’t a debate, nobody did really. In gauging a forum like this one I’d say it’s sort of like the adage about the Saturday round during the Masters golf tournament. A player can’t win the Masters on Saturday but they can sure lose it.
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By that standard two candidates — one Democrat and one Republican — fared poorly. This was likely caused by either a serious case of the jitters or a lack of command of the issues at hand. In truth, it was probably a little of both. I won’t name them here — or ANYWHERE ON THIS POST, if you get my drift.
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Any surprises?
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Right off the bat I’d say Democratic candidate Tristan Patterson was a revelation mainly because at age 23 he’s by far the youngest candidate in the field and seemed to have good command of his facts and the issues. He was very poised for someone of his age and experience.
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Overall I thought the vast majority of the candidates in both parties more than held their own. It was, on both sides, a conservative lot and there was almost no discernible sharp disagreement. The only point of contention was between incumbent GOP Commissioner Bill Lashley and everybody else on the matter of taxes. Apparently no one in the field is as opposed to them as Lashley is. This is Lashley’s point of view anyway. From his perspective, there is nobody in the free world more opposed to taxes than Lashley himself.
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Anything else on Tristan Patterson?
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Well I found it interesting that he now identifies himself not as a businessman but as a full-time candidate for the Board of Commissioners. Hope he understands the pay ain’t that great for this gig. That’ll change of course when he gets to be president.
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Did anybody really understand state Rep. Cary Allred’s question?
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Not really. Well, perhaps a few did but since Allred never really asked a question it’s almost impossible to know for sure. Democrats Eddie Boswell and Linda Massey weren’t the only ones one who had puzzled expressions. Republican Hayes Teague offered to speak with Allred about the issue at greater length later to more fully comprehend it. And Incumbent GOP Commissioner Dan Ingle admitted to spending 45 minutes talking on the phone with Allred on a recent night. Allred then engaged in a loud discussion — on his end anyway — with Lashley about it outside the theater when the forum was over and innocent bystanders were trying to get safely to their cars, or to Mi Casa for the previously mentioned margarita.
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And people say running for president is a grind.
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Laughs of the night … GOP
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Lashley — and his opponents for that matter — got lots of mileage out of Lashley’s remark that on his current board he’s surrounded by a few what he called “Country Club Republicans” who make cutting taxes more difficult because they spend money like there’s no tomorrow and mentioned others on the forum panel. Commissioner candidate and school board chairman Tom Manning got the line of the night when he responded by saying “Thanks for sharing Bill.”
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But nearly every other hopeful weighed in, including Lashley’s colleague Ingle, who prefaced by saying “I’m not a member of the country club but … .” Larry Lee, Lee Isley and Teague all did the same.
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It makes for good theater but not really accurate discussion. Sadly this kind of politics and labeling work together like Rove and Atwater. But it don’t make such statements necessarily so.
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Take, for example, the abundantly weary tag “Tax-and-Spend Liberal Democrat.” There may be such a thing but there aren’t many left — kind of like mastodons of yore. In my experience, Democrats and Republicans both greatly enjoy spending money — but they really disagree about what to spend it on. The truth is, if Washington politics is any indication, the far more prevalent species these days are the “Spend and Spend Some More Republicans.” This seems to be President Bush’s personal mantra.
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Now if Alamance County government operated like the Bush Administration this would happen: When the GOP is in charge the sheriff’s department would be outfitted with Hummers, LCACs, Howitzers and V-22 Osprey aircraft that would be based at a prison facility the size of Sing-Sing. After blowing $4.5 billion there, the board would announce a tax cut.
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When the Democrats are in charge the newer high schools would be modeled after Duke University combined with the Taj Mahal. The shrubbery would be the largest single expense but there would also be gourmet meals, exhibits of art by Monet, high-speed internet and HDTV in each and every square foot and a graham cracker and chocolate milk machine in every classroom. After blowing $4.5 billion there, the board would charge a user fee to take art courses.
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Cast your ballots!
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For the record
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<blockquote>
From my perspective I’d like to offer a correction to a statement made by Massey on the subject of open government. The former mayor of Haw River answered a question on the subject by stating that sometimes governments are bound by law to meet behind closed doors. This isn’t exactly true. The North Carolina Open Meetings law only states that local governments CAN meet out of public view to discuss certain issues such as personnel, land acquisition and legal matters.
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But they don’t have to.
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Local governments in North Carolina can, in theory, talk about any of this stuff in open session and be within the law. They could also release more information on these issues and still be within the law.
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They choose not to.
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This is a dodge local governments use to keep information from the public. To be fair, in some cases it’s wise to avoid releasing some information to avoid potential lawsuit, especially in some sticky personnel situations. That doesn’t mean, however, that the public should be completely in the dark about why, say, a department head is fired at midnight by the county commissioners.
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And the argument that closed meetings are the best ways to conduct business when it comes to luring industry or buying land are flat wrong. These are things people need to know so they can determine whether government is making the best decisions possible or if something potentially troublesome is coming to their neighborhoods. Sometimes it’s to make sure government leaders aren’t making sweetheart deals for themselves, friends of family members.
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We’d like to see state law changed to something more in line with what’s used in Florida — where very little can be conducted in secret.
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A farm, or not
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On the subject of land-use planning the matter of farms came up. From my experience there seems to be some confusion over what constitutes a farm, which is why land-uise planning is worth talking about.
The topic of hog farms was casually broached Tuesday night. It’s easy to be so dismissive in the Piedmont where there aren’t any hog farms to speak of. In eastern North Carolina, where I lived from 1992 to 2007, calling such operations “farms” is a wholly inaccurate characterization of what we’re talking about. In Duplin and Sampson counties these so-called farms are actually industrial areas where tens of thousands pigs are raised in places with waste treatment facilities large enough to take care of a small city. Hog lagoons are actually massive craters filled with animal waste — many of them thousands of square feet in size and located near rivers and streams.
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When I lived in Jacksonville one of those lagoons ruptured and 25 million gallons of hog poop spilled into a river there that flowed from Richlands to the ocean. That’s 25 million gallons enveloping a shrimp you might eat later.
And try watching an orange plume of hog excrement travel down a river through the middle of town killing fish along the way and then tell me it’s not an industrial incident.
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Good luck on Tuesday. And if you need a margarita, you know where to get one.
