SPRING 2005 NEWSLETTER
GEORGIA FOI ACCESS
GEORGIA FIRST AMENDMENT FOUNDATION

GOP prepares wrong message
Bartow County couple’s experience 'puts a face' on HB 218

By Jim Wooten
in his editorial-page column in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Atlanta, Feb. 20, 2005 -- The primary infrastructure, says Bartow County resident Toni Martin, is cow patties. The first indication that 300 acres of cow patties were to become the site of a $125 million Toyo Tire & Rubber Co. factory was an 11-by-17 inch sign posted the week before Christmas.

"I can put a face on House Bill 218," says Martin. "That plant is now half-built and stands across the road from my house, approximately 300 feet from my front door. We were just sitting up here, minding our own business in a properly zoned area, and in one fell swoop" the land was rezoned and the plant was approved. "It has disturbed our life terribly."

The home she and her husband occupy on 16 acres was built in 1935 by Italian stonemasons brought here by Henry Ford to help build Berry College in Rome. "We have four grandsons who love our farm, and we thought we were set for life because the place was paid for," she says.

The experience of Martin and her neighbors is every resident's nightmare. "Every bit of information we have been able to weasel out has been through Open Records," says Martin.

They attempted to challenge the rezoning, but when threatened with a counter-suit for abusive litigation by the local development authority, a suit that could have ruined them financially, they gave up. "This is exactly the process other people may have to endure if this bill passes," she says.

Republicans who now control Georgia government are on the verge of a decision that, like the Democrats' heavy-handedness in redistricting, will come back to haunt them. In passing HB 218 they will position themselves on the side of those who threaten to secretly pop a tire plant, or worse, on the land next door.

Georgians are forming first impressions of GOP governance. Those impressions will last. In a developing state, there will be many Toni-vs.-Toyo confrontations in the years to come, especially in those trending-Republican counties 50 miles from the state Capitol. Each new surprise will trigger a reminder that the GOP stood for secrecy.

Republicans see this as a media issue. For them, it is least of all a media issue. They make the same mistake that many social scientists and we journalists make --- they set out to confirm their own preconceived notion about what they believe to be true. The real temptation, when we get the answer we want, is to quit looking.

Republicans believe "the media" are biased against them. An issue like this, then, is easily dismissed as an adversarial media acting in their self-interest. That answer is comfortable. They quit looking.

Their problem on HB 218 is not with the media. It is with Georgians who expected something different from this party.

Former Gov. Roy Barnes was, in my view, one of Georgia's best governors

--- best in the sense that he attempted to do something he thought meaningful with the power granted. Georgians threw him out because, with redistricting, the flag, transportation and perhaps education, he projected imperialism, conveying a message to Georgians that they didn't matter --- or at the very least, they couldn't be trusted.

That particular view gained currency among liberals developing LBJ's Great Society initiatives, and it continues to this day. The view is that the locals can't be trusted to make the right decisions. So the federal government, in creating social programs, set up regional planning and spending agencies that bypassed local governments. One result was no accountability whatsoever.

The view that people can't be trusted to know or do what's best for themselves --- and therefore Big Government must --- is decidedly un-Republican. Yet the premise of HB 218 is that people can't be trusted to make responsible decisions about what comes into their communities --- and so secrecy is essential until their objections no longer matter. Wrong message. That's the government they inherited, not the one they claim.

For a couple of years, at least, everything Republicans do sends a defining message of who they are and what they believe. Those messages either lengthen or shorten their days.

Jim Wooten is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution associate editorial page editor.