{"id":2876,"date":"2012-05-13T11:19:02","date_gmt":"2012-05-13T18:19:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/2012\/05\/13\/commissioners-answer-questions\/"},"modified":"2012-05-29T21:27:36","modified_gmt":"2012-05-30T04:27:36","slug":"commissioners-answer-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/2012\/05\/commissioners-answer-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"commissioners answer questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leadership gets to the heart of the question.\u00a0 3 syllables, easy enough to say, but elusive and even fleeting to find in practice.\u00a0 Saturday morning, people came to find it, to see it in the flesh.\u00a0 As one Republican put it to me later that day, in hearing the candidates dialog he was expecting to find a compelling reason to change commissioners.\u00a0 He expected the challengers to make a passionate case that something with the current commission had gone horribly wrong.\u00a0 He wanted to hear the compelling reason the commissioners should be ridden out of town on a rail, perhaps trailing tar and feathers.\u00a0 You know, a reason akin to the situation facing us with Obama in the presidential race.<\/p>\n

If you haven\u2019t listened to the 4 streams of commissioner candidates answering questions (Del Schwab<\/a>, Larry Ross<\/a>, Robert Rowland<\/a>, John Shipper<\/a>), now would be a good time to do so.\u00a0 If you listen closely you\u2019ll be able to pick out several factual problems in the New-Plains reportage of the event<\/a>.\u00a0 As an aside, I like this form of presentation that removes all input — crowd, answer sequence, moderator influence — extraneous to the candidates\u2019 speech itself.\u00a0 All that extra theater can confuse some people.<\/p>\n

At the end of the meeting on Saturday, none of the mudballs thrown by challengers and their supporters over the past few months turn out to have stuck.\u00a0 No bad decisions, no smoking guns, no graft, no corruption, no skullduggery, no mismanagement, no financial impropriety, no bad faith, no conflicts of interest, and no failures of any leadership duties.\u00a0 None of the innuendo the left so liberally distribute on the web and at public meetings has panned out.\u00a0 Not a single nugget left in the pan after all the swirling mud drains out.<\/p>\n

Turns out the commissioners already were transparent and they already had been facilitating various venues for citizen input to substantive government.\u00a0 They\u2019ve upheld statutory financial requirements, they\u2019ve balanced the books, they\u2019ve had open doors to hear every public and private interest group. They have ongoing relations with every subordinate governmental organization, every department head, and every citizen in the county.<\/p>\n

So then, what complaints did the challengers bring yesterday?\u00a0 What fuels their passion and makes them rise from the status quo of normal life to seek public office now?<\/p>\n

After taking out all the unsubstantiated mud from the mix, we\u2019re left with:<\/p>\n