COVID-19 has taken its toll on a lot of things.
I can’t say for sure that it has negatively affected the way our county government operates, but I do know one thing.
It didn’t used to be this way.
It was by no means perfect, but prior to the pandemic, our board of supervisors operated in a more professional manner, and there wasn’t half as much confusion regarding day-to-day operations as there is now.
Since the start of 2021, board members have been fighting over money and equipment purchases, and the insults have been hurled with ease.
It’s time for the board to take a step back and breathe a little and come up with a better way of handling the county’s busines.
They’ve done it before, so we know it’s not impossible.
The main issue started back in January when District 5 Supervisor Gloria Dickerson recommended the county place a sizable piece of equipment, in both weight and price, into a loan for the road department.
That piece of equipment eventually turned into two, and both were approved in a $1.1 million borrow that went largely against the advice of the county road manager.
County Road Manager T.J. Fairley told the board during a work session last month that even if they bought the equipment, his men are not trained on using it, and there was a question of whether the county had the money to pay for the materials to keep the equipment operational.
The supervisors made promises to their constituents prior to the election in 2019 that they would do their best to fix the roads in the county.
It is understandable that Dickerson, as well as others on the board, feel like they have to start somewhere. Even if the roads won’t be fixed tomorrow, they’ll never be repaired if the county neglects to buy the necessary equipment to do it.
The mentality: If we wait until all the stars align with funding, we’ll never fix any roads, and Dickerson made a decent point that lack of training should not be an excuse to forgo purchasing something “essential.” If the workers aren’t trained, train them.
District 1 Supervisor Glenn Donald sees it differently.
Donald says we’re still in the midst of a pandemic, and there may be many citizens who are not able to pay their taxes, and the county should not diminish its borrowing power for unneeded equipment when they may be forced to borrow in lieu of collecting property taxes.
Donald also says that some of his colleagues are operating under the beat system, which means they are trying to control the road department within their districts, rather than as a unit, which is the system Sunflower County operates under.
He says the board should listen to its road manager and allow him to run the day-to-day operations of his department.
These sorts of conflicts have arisen before, and they will always be there, but the decorum at our county’s Zoom meetings has been less than desirable.
At times, it’s almost unlistenable.
Most of the shouting is over money, which has become a source of conflict and confusion over the past month or so.
The $1.1 million loan that includes the beforementioned equipment was hotly contested by Donald, so much so that he says he is filing an ethics complaint against Dickerson and Board President Riley Rice.
There was also the issue of the Fuelman credit card bills that seemed to go unpaid.
And then there was that emergency meeting last Thursday to complete an inter-fund loan from the general fund to the road department.
Not that the county is out of money, but it appears there might be some accounting compliance issues with writing checks out of an account that shows a negative balance. Again, it’s not uncommon for the road department to show a negative balance prior to the spring, when much of the county’s property taxes are collected through sale or redemption.
Why all the confusion over matters that seemed to be handled so smoothly over a year ago?
They say familiarity breeds contempt, but lack of familiarity during the pandemic, I believe, has bred this confusion.
In an ideal world, the county, and all other boards, would start meeting again in-person, instead of the less desirable way on Zoom. But we still have a long way to go before our population is vaccinated and we achieve some sort of herd immunity.
In the meantime, the county board needs to figure out how to get along and run its business with the tools it has available.
