While Athens residents are struggling to recover from ACC Government forced lock downs, job losses, business closings and rampant inflation, this is what some of our ACC commissioners are trying to slip under the radar during the holidays.
While people are traveling and trying to enjoy time with their families, some of your elected representatives are hard at work rewarding themselves by doubling their salaries! Did the Mayor or commissioners miss a single paycheck while many businesses were forcibly closed as being non-essential? Nope. Nary a penny did they lose. And yet this is what they do when they think no one is paying attention.
Commission seats have always been part time positions. The current crop of Commissioners have some members who are so drunk on spending what they did not earn, they are continually demanding more and more unnecessary meetings to ramrod through as many bad public polices on the public's dime as they can. Infrequent meetings have now become almost daily occurrences making it difficult on working commissioners to manage. Instead of having 5 ot 6 agenda items they now can have up to 90! The public cannot keep up with the issues which is by design.
Issues are voted on and passed before Athens residents even know what hit them. It‘s always easy spending other people's money. Commission seats were never intended to be a career or to be a commissioner's sole means of support. Individuals elected to the commission are expected to be capable of providing their own means of support. An individual incapable of meeting their own basic needs can hardly be a wise choice for exercising responsibility over budgets in the millions. Business owners, professionals and otherwise contributing members are vested in the community and presumably will do what is best for the entire community.
Electing commissioners whose sole support is the taxpayer and then expecting them to be responsible for how they spend public monies they had no role in generating defies logic. If the only reason someone would run for public office is the salary, ask yourself would you even want them?
Four of the six pay raise signers are up for reelection in 2022: Denson, Link, Davenport and Edwards. Please share this information with as many people as possible so the community will be aware of what they are trying to do. This will presumably be coming up on the Jan 4th agenda.
Donna Carter
Athens
Margaret Thatcher once said that "The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."
Well said! Hello Citizens of ACC, have u had enough of this crowd? Time for a lot of vocal and persistent citizen push back to the Mayor and Commission. Vote no on the TSLOST to send a message. They need to replaced in Nov.
I would support requiring elected officials to have a credit score over 750 to hold office ..if you can't manage personal finances ..what qualifies you to decide on the use of--or creation of (by tax) of public money
The people select thei officials.
And don’t forget they get Health Insurance.