By: Robin Ford Wallace, Staff Reporter

When Roger Woodyard complained last month to the Dade County Commission that a quarter of Rising Fawn’s fire hydrants were out of order, laying the blame at the door of the Dade Water Authority, he said he didn’t want it to be a political football. But at their regularly scheduled March meeting last Thursday, commissioners were still kicking the issue pretty hard.

And no one was kicking harder than District 1 Commissioner Lamar Lowery, who proposed major changes to the structure of the Water Authority’s board of directors, giving the Commis-sion a voice on it.  “I’m sick and tired of telling citizens and firefighters there’s nothing we can do about it,” he said.

Lowery touched on the fire-flow situation, saying a dozen hydrants in his Wildwood district didn’t work, and that in the Creek Road neighborhood where he lives, a two-inch water line under Highway 11 feeds a six-inch line that supplies hydrants. “You don’t gotta be a plumber to realize that two inches won’t keep a six-inch line filled full to fill up a tanker truck when time is everything,” he said.

But he also pointed out access problems, saying that the headaches residents of Sand Mountain’s Bible Camp Road are presently experiencing getting public water are ones he experienced himself with the last house he’d built. “We had to buy the water pipe from the water system, hire their contractors to put it in, and once it was in, it belonged to them (the Water Authority),” he said. “This ain’t right, folks.”

He said that Dade citizens were expected to pay for pipes to access the main, while meanwhile the Water Authority owned 100 miles of water lines in neighboring Walker County. “Do you think Walker County paid for those lines?” he said. 

As it stands, the Water Authority is governed by a board of directors appointed for five-year terms by the county grand jury convened every April. Lowery suggested changing it so that the five county voting districts are each represented by a member, possibly appointed by the Commission, with two more members representing the city of Trenton. 

Under this plan, the chairman of the Commission, currently County Executive Ted Rumley, would also be the chairman of the water board and would cast the deciding vote in the event of ties.  

Lowery said that state Senator Jeff Mullis was willing to introduce legislation for the change providing there was consensus among the commissioners. 

And the other commissioners in fact expressed solidarity. Commissioners Peter Cervelli and Scottie Pittman of Districts 4 and 2, respectively, both reported fire hydrant problems on their own turfs during their addresses to the public, and Chairman Rumley said he planned to meet with Sen. Mullis on Tuesday. 

“The Commission should have some say-so on that board,” said Rumley. “We’re not just talking about it.  We’ve got to do something here.”

In other business, the Commission reappointed Sandra Pullen to the local board of directors of DFACS (Department of Family and Children’s Services), approving Sue Gray to fill the unexpired term of Joe Gaddis on the same board. Eddie Pittman was approved to serve out the unexpired library board term of Christy Davison, who resigned in favor of a paid position at the library.

Commissioners also voted to approve an amendment to their budget, a formality necessitated by receipt of reimbursed funds and of a stimulus transportation grant to buy new vans.

In his monthly report, Commissioner Pittman assured the public he hadn’t forgotten about a planned community center and walking track for the Davis and New Home communities. The initial $7,000 earmarked for those projects was still in the bank, he said, but prospects of more funds to join it had dried up when the economy tanked in late 2008. “The money just disappeared,” he said.

Plans to add a concrete pad at the county transfer station, so that patrons don’t have to wait while trash receptacles are emptied, were similarly delayed, said Pittman. “Money’s what’s holding us up there,” he said.

District 4’s Cervelli, reporting on financials, said that sales tax collections were bad as usual. “The only good news is it’s not going down,” he said.

Cervelli said that he would know within two weeks whether the Georgia Environmental Facilities Authority (GEFA) had approved a grant to renovate a decaying sewer at the extreme end of his Lookout Mountain district.  “That’ll be the last piece of the puzzle to help fix that sewer system up at Flintstone,” he said.

Cervelli as well as the other commissioners gave special thanks to the county road crews, firefighters and 911 staff for their work during the snow and ice of the earlier part of the week.

Robert Goff of District 3 used his public address to take an antilittering stance. People enjoyed living in Dade because of its natural beauty, he said. “But when you’re riding around some of our roads and you see the trash and the tires and the old living room suits and the mattresses that people are throwing out, there’s some places that aren’t too beautiful,” he said. 

Goff urged citizens to help him enforce existing laws against littering. “We need to do a better job on policing our streets for the trash,” he said.

Instances of littering may be reported to the Commission at (706) 657-4625 or to the Dade Sheriff’s Department at (706) 657-3233.

Goff also pointed out that the state had never appointed Dade another county agent after Ted Dyer left the job some time ago. “They’re even talking about now closing our 4-H, cutting 4-H out completely,” he warned. He urged citizens to contact state legislators in support of the program.

And finally, he stressed the importance of complying with the 2010 U.S. Census so that Dade can receive its fair share of funding from higher government. “We are entitled to more if our numbers are correctly counted,” he said.

Commissioner Cervelli backed Goff up, adding that Dade is one of only three areas in Georgia that do not receive settlement money from the tobacco companies; the county doesn’t seem poor enough to rate the funds, he said, because poverty figures are based on income information 10 years old.

This was a point also stressed by Chairman Rumley in his own address. Because of “tier ratings” based on poverty figures, surrounding areas received funding that enabled them to make themselves more attractive to industry, said Rumley. “There’s so much more that other counties can offer them than Dade County,” he said.

Rumley reported that a longstanding red tape problem at Canyon Park Estates had finally been fixed.  Because it would involve working on state park property, Dade had been forbidden to divert flood water from the canyon away from the housing development. Physically, it was a simple problem, but jurisdictionally it had required multiple meetings at the state level. “We got that cleared up this morning,” said Rumley, joking that he had effected the cure by threatening legislators with the ferocity and fearlessness of Dade’s ravening local press.

Rumley said that he had met with the developers of Rising Fawn’s Wild Moon development and that they had agreed to supply information for a local impact report, a lengthy process. “This may be a couple, three-month process,” he said.

He said that work on Pike’s Drive, a private Sand Mountain road being repaired by a lumber concern after residents complained logging trucks had damaged it, seemed to be going satisfactorily but that the county had not yet pronounced on the improvements.