On at least a couple of occasions I have used this blog to rail, rant, rave and recriminate against the local yokel actions of the Fannin County Board of Commissioners. Some of you have suggested to me that a newcomer in a rural county like Fannin has little chance of influencing the way the entrenched good ol’ boys do their business. Well, read on.
About a year ago I discovered that Fannin County does not post its code of ordinances online for people to review at their convenience. That bugged me. Most local governments began making their codes of ordinances available online shortly after the worldwide web become established. What was that—thirty years ago? I figured it was about time that Fannin County got with the times. So about seven months ago I wrote an open letter to the Fannin County commissioners urging them to place their code online. I also met with the Bill Simonds, the chairmen of the county commission, to urge my point.
A couple of weeks later I discovered that the last time Fannin County codified its ordinances was in 2007. That really bugged me. How the hell can you know what the law is if you don’t codify it? Hammurabi figured that out 4,000 years ago. I understand that it takes longer for new innovations to spread into the sticks, but four millennia is a bit much don’t you think?
At the same time that I found a Georgia statute, enacted in 2001, which requires Georgia counties to codify and publish their ordinances annually. Fannin County has complied with the statute only once in 14 years. So I wrote a letter to Simonds and the county attorney (who I have little regard for) accompanied by a detailed analysis of the statute.
For months after that I heard nothing from Simonds. My frustration reached a peak about five weeks ago, and I tried to contact him to find out what the county was doing to comply with the statute. All four of the emails I sent to his official email address (which is on his business card but not on the county website) returned an error message. Now I was really getting pissed off.
A couple of weeks ago something else happened that pissed me off and that is Simonds’ most recent attempt to limit what citizens can talk about during the open public comments portion of the commission meetings. Last year he enacted a rule that prohibited political comments. At the last commission meeting he announced a list of five topics that he did not want citizens to discuss during public comment—things like government spending and efforts to improve county government. Such rules are, of course, gross violations of the First Amendment.
His recent attempt to stifle free speech pissed me off so much that I wrote letters to the editors of all three local newspapers accusing him of acting like a petty two-bit banana republic dictator. Perhaps it is not the most calm and dispassionate letter I have ever written.
The day after I emailed the letter to the newspapers I stopped in to see Simonds to see if the county had made any progress in codifying and publishing its ordinances. To my utter delight he told me that he and the county attorney had met with Municipal Code Corporation, a company that codifies ordinances and publishes them online, and that the county was in the process of complying with the statute.
He thanked me for bringing the statute to his attention and said that he had not known that the statute existed until I called his attention to it. Never one to miss an opportunity to get in a dig, I observed that it is the county attorney’s job to keep him informed of such matters. (He is aware of my feelings for the county attorney. In the previous meeting with him seven months ago I told him that she was not very good. I believe I may have used the word “horrible.”)
Then, to my surprise, he asked me what I thought about his rules for public comment at county commission meetings. I gave him an earful about how they were unconstitutional and exposed the county to an indefensible lawsuit for damages and attorney’s fees under the federal civil rights act. Even though a number of people have told me that he is an unprincipled weasel, it seemed to me that he was receptive to what I had to say.
He asked me to submit something in writing about the law in this area. Fortunately, I wrote an article for the Florida Bar Journal on this subject several years ago. It is stock full of complicated and lengthy legal citations. It was not accepted for publication, and I understand the reason why. I honed and distilled the article until it is so dense and obtuse that it reads like something out of the New England Journal of Medicine. Frankly, it is almost unintelligible to most lawyers, much less layman.
So my plan is to submit an easy-to-read summary of the law to Simonds and attach the article to show my bona fides. I’m almost certain that no one in county government, not even the county attorney, will be able to wade through the article, but that’s not the point. With all that dense legal prose and pages and pages of citations using all those impressive citation forms like see, e.g, rev’d on other grounds, and contra, the article is bound to impress the shit of them and make them think I’m as smart as Judge Judy.
It may occur to you at this point that Simonds’ apparent willingness to listen to me about his unconstitutional restrictions on free speech has created a real problem for me. Remember that I just sent letters to the editors of every newspaper in town accusing him of being a two-bit banana republic dictator who tramples the First Amendment rights of the good citizens of Fannin County. Oops.
I’ve never read “How to Make Friends and Influence People,” but I’m pretty sure there’s a chapter in there that says it’s not the best idea to insult someone you are trying to influence. So now I have frantic emails out to the newspapers begging them not to publish my letter. Because the newspapers are weekly I won’t know how successful I have been until the middle of next week.
So I guess the primary point of this post is that it is possible for an outsider to have an impact on the way the good ol’ boys do things. All it takes is doing your research, knowing what you’re talking about, making good suggestions and not insulting them. It seems I have to work on the last point.
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