East Cobb Opinion

EDITOR’S NOTE: A free press and the health of local news

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free press

Earlier this week a few hundred newspapers and other news organizations around the country published editorials in response to President Donald Trump’s charged rhetoric against a free press and to advocate for what journalists do.

I’m not sure such a coordinated effort had much of an impact, especially given the state of the newspaper industry. As one national press observer wrote, this tactic played into Trump’s hands, and I tend to agree.

You don’t have to like Trump’s declaration that the press is “the enemy of the people”—it’s an outlandish, false assertion, like so much of what he says—to understand his objectives of inflaming his political base and pushing journalists back on their heels.About East Cobb News, Wendy Parker

Ever since he first ran for president, Trump has engaged in press-bashing that’s truly alarming. While the news media has plenty of shortcomings, including getting much of its coverage of the last election dreadfully wrong, no president should speak like this.

However, I’m more concerned about what public officials do rather than what they say, as demonizing and unbecoming as Trump’s nonsense about “fake news” has been.

One of the papers that editorialized against Trump’s words this week is the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, which has been aggressively attacked by public officials for its reporting of a story of great local and national interest.

The Fort Lauderdale newspaper published details about the alleged gunman in the Parkland high school shootings that the school system there released unintentionally.

A local judge was incensed, not by the schools trying to hide vital public information, but by the newspaper, which she threatened to hold in contempt.

The Sun-Sentinel isn’t backing down, although the political and legal power being brought to bear against it is formidable.

Forget all the hot air coming from Washington, Trump as well as an often grandstanding national political press corps that continues to misunderstand what propelled him to the White House.

The Sun-Sentinel case illustrates to me that the real battles for a free press are being fought at the local level, where journalists are in increasingly shorter supply these days.

That’s because chains and hedge funds are scooping up what’s left of independent and locally owned papers, strip-mining them of whatever value is left in a dying business, and leaving their communities to fend for their own news and information needs.

Trump’s newsprint tariffs, reaching 30 percent, are taking a big toll as well, affecting even our local daily newspaper.

For those of us in local news, the retort to Trump shouldn’t be to him at all but to keep doing what we pledge for our communities. The news.

Dan Whisenhunt of Decaturish, who like me is a member of the Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers, put it simply: Answer attacks on journalism with more journalism.

It’s not a new sentiment.

Kevin Riley, editor of the AJC, where I proudly worked for nearly 20 years, wrote that “We’re not engaged in a shouting match with the President. We are working on stories like these,” and then rattled off some of its recent reports.

In the year-plus since I launched East Cobb News, I’ve been grateful to connect with local citizens about critical issues facing our community.

Even when we don’t agree, as was the case with a previous commentary I published this week, hearing from engaged readers and citizens is essential for a free press and the community.

I’m encouraged to be in touch with these East Cobb citizens and taxpayers, regardless of their views, and especially regarding our heated budget process this summer, and continuing discussions on growth, county finances, schools and more.

There’s a lot going on here just in our corner of Cobb County, and I’m eager to continue to build this site and foster important community conversations.

I don’t intend to use East Cobb News as a soapbox like this very often. I want this to be your platform more than anything.

If you care deeply about what happens in East Cobb, don’t be bashful about it.

If you don’t agree with what’s published here, sound off. That’s what the comment section is for on every post.

If you don’t like what you seeing being done in your name as a taxpayer, parent, citizen or in any other capacity, let’s hear it. Let’s talk about it. Let’s get to the heart of the matter, through reporting and discussion.

I’ve seen good results along these lines in the early months of this site, and I look forward to hearing more from you in the months to come.

 

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Series on Cobb County growth issues misses the mark

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Ebenezer Road park preview, Cobb growth issues
Cobb commissioners spent $1.7 million this year to buy Ebenezer Road property for a future passive park. (East Cobb News photos by Wendy Parker)

Last week a national organization that examines municipal and local governance concerns published a series of posts about Cobb County growth issues, especially in the years since the recession.

The organization is called Strong Towns, which I have not heard of before. It describes itself as a non-profit media organization that’s based in Brainerd, Minn., a small town with a population of 13,000 or so, not close to a metropolitan area.

On Tuesdays I like to focus on local government, since that’s when many Cobb Board of Commissioners meetings take place. Today’s meeting has been cancelled, and I thought I’d delve a little into this interesting, but flawed examination.

The five-part Strong Towns report, which has gotten some chatter on Cobb citizens social media groups, refers to Cobb as “a suburban region that epitomizes the folly of going into debt to build more and more infrastructure with no ability to pay for it.”

Cobb growth issues
Condominiums along Powers Ferry Road are part of a high-density community spreading out from SunTrust Park.

While that’s certainly how many locals around here feel about what’s happening in the county, I think the premise is faulty, and I’m skeptical of some of the claims made in this report.

Strong Towns misses one of the biggest points of all: Cobb remains a very attractive magnet for jobs because of its diversified economy and a well-educated workforce, the partial byproduct of another major attraction here, excellent public schools.

Cobb isn’t as “addicted to growth,” as the initial post is titled, as much as new residents and employers are continuously drawn by quality services and low taxes. A heavy pipeline of development bottled up during the lean years of the recession is taking shape.

These realities were not examined by Strong Towns, but I will link to all the posts in this series so you can read for yourself:

In an evergreen post elsewhere on its site, Strong Towns claims that many cities and counties in America are falling for a “Growth Ponzi Scheme,” which it further asserts as “the dominant model of suburban growth since the mid-20th century.”

The final post about Cobb started off with a reference to Bernie Madoff, who’s serving prison time for defrauding investors.

Really? To try to make a link between criminal behavior and the development and financial issues of a bustling suburban county, albeit one with major budget problems, borders on being irresponsible, as well as willfully misunderstanding.

Cobb growth issues
Cobb commissioners this spring adopted the long-delayed Johnson Ferry Urban Design Guidelines to guide future growth in the busy commercial corridor.

I will always detest the Atlanta Braves stadium deal because the process was a total sham. But that doesn’t explain the county’s budget, tax and spending issues, which go back many years.

The county wasn’t chasing growth as much as it wasn’t sufficiently funding the growth that was already here or on the way, or was having trouble keeping up with the pace of the growth.

(Here’s a good example: When our family moved to East Cobb in the early 1970s, our home was still on septic tank, with the Sope Creek sewer line still under construction.)

There is an anti-suburban sentiment behind this report, and this is the biggest problem with it:

“Much of Cobb County . . . feels like nowhere. It has no center of gravity. It has no thriving urban core to serve as a tax-revenue cash cow.”

Cobb growth issues
A citizen living near a proposed townhome community near Olde Town Athletic Club demonstrated to county commissioners this spring the building heights that were part of the initial plan.

Ironically, the area around SunTrust may prove to be just such a place. Cobb does have many misplaced priorities, symbolized by the Braves deal, and which I wrote not long ago stripped away the illusion of supposedly fiscally conservative government.

Instead of really trying to understand the unique challenges facing a Sunbelt community that has gone from mostly rural to suburban and now urban in many spots, and in about a half-century or so, Strong Towns wants Cobb to be more like Brainerd, I guess (a place where I’ve never been).

From what I’ve read about this organization, it wants every place to be like small-town America, with bucolic downtown cores, pedestrian-friendly shops and restaurants and adaptable to a  “traditional development pattern.”

While that sentiment does have some conservative support, and it’s appealing to me as I continue on in middle age, it has never really come about in Cobb, for better or for worse.

It’s a nice ideal, but it doesn’t offer any practical solutions. Strong Towns produced a lot of words about Cobb County but with little real local knowledge on the ground about its subject.

That matters.

 

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Why just saying ‘no’ to a Cobb tax increase wasn’t enough

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Cobb tax increase
East Cobb citizens had their say at several budget town hall meetings this summer, including at the Sewell Mill Library on July 9, shortly before commissioners voted to raise property taxes. (East Cobb News file photo)

Whenever the subject of a Cobb tax increase comes up, those who say “no” the loudest and most often quite often have prevailed.

Especially after I returned to the county in 1990, the “nos” have frequently had the ear of elected officials.

They have done almost anything to heed those citizens who urge them to: Cut wasteful spending. Impose a hiring freeze. Take care of needs instead of wants. Live within your means, just like we do.

These have been the bedrock principles of low-tax conservatism for as long as I can remember growing up in Cobb County.

Cobb became a magnet for new residents and businesses in large part because of low taxes. That’s still a big attraction, but so are good government services and schools. As a result, Cobb’s explosive growth, especially in the last 30 years, has generated another constituency.

These citizens, coming from all across the county, and representing many demographic and socioeconomic classes and interest levels, effectively countered the “no” forces during the budget deliberations that concluded this week with a general fund property tax rate increase of 1.7 mills.

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Those citizens have been extremely vocal over the past few months about supporting the services they feared were being imperiled as a $30 million deficit loomed.

As draft lists were made public about potential “savings” in library and park services, the UGA Cobb Extension service and other small-bore line items, these citizens formed their own groups. Some started on Facebook, then fanned out to attend budget town hall meetings and public hearings and urged their members to tell commissioners what they valued.

They were every bit as active and organized as those who opposed a tax increase. At this point, the naysayers may wish to point out that citizens were whipped up into a frenzy by Commission Chairman Mike Boyce, who cited the need for a millage rate increase to keep Cobb “a five-star county.”

I wrote previously that there was some emotional blackmail involved as these lists were made public. I also wrote that a tax increase was likely. For far too long, Cobb elected officials have been fearful of getting an earful from those who always say “no.”

The problem with always saying no is that the provision of services wasn’t keeping up with the demand. Even as Cobb’s population grew from 450,000 in 1990 to more than 750,000 today, commissioners were gradually reducing the millage rate.

A post-recession situation emerged in which library hours hadn’t been restored, Cobb DOT maintenance crews hadn’t been replenished and the county had to hire dozens of new police officers.

Cobb tax increase
Members of the Cobb Master Gardeners spoke in favor of preserving the UGA Cobb Extension Service.

As I listened to those who were saying “yes,” I heard the voices of Cobb citizens adamantly insisting that the services they valued were worth a few extra dollars a month on their tax bill.

Among those standing up were members of the Master Gardener Volunteers of Cobb County. I’ve been hearing from them all summer. They work with the UGA Cobb Extension Office, which runs the local 4-H program and gets equal funding from the county and the state.

Also saying “yes” were some citizens who identified themselves as fiscal conservatives. These weren’t garden variety Berkeley radicals but suburban gardeners. They were also library and arts patrons and everyday people not prone to political activism.

None of those saying “yes” that I heard this summer are wild about a tax increase. I’m certainly not, but Cobb leaders have been dodging this bullet for too many years. After playing ball with the Atlanta Braves, they cut the millage rate in 2016, right before SunTrust Park became operational.

To me, that was the height of fiscal irresponsibility. Yet many proud fiscal conservatives have ignored that this summer, or belatedly sprung to action. The local newspaper fulminated in a thunderclap editorial that Boyce went against his promises of no new taxes, and fretted that “conservatism has fallen out of fashion” yet again.

(I’d argue that real, principled conservatism went out of fashion when the four members of the commission who are Republicans voted to subsidize a baseball stadium, an action the daily printed edition uncritically approved. The lone Democrat, occasionally slammed by the same publication, cast the only vote against it.)

Earlier this month, citizens against a tax increase lobbied for a hiring freeze, even as DOT, public safety and other positions have been frozen for several years.

The day before the budget vote, the Cobb GOP passed a resolution against a tax increase with plenty of boilerplate language, but no tangible suggestions to balance the budget.

Commissioner Bob Ott

JoAnn Birrell and Bob Ott, East Cobb’s commissioners, were on the short end of the 3-2 vote. Birrell wanted a smaller increase, Ott wanted to see more proposed spending cuts.

The decisive vote was cast by Bob Weatherford, drubbed the day before in a runoff against a tax increase opponent, but who said it was time for the county to invest its future.

Though his support for a tax increase may have cost him his political future, Weatherford’s rationale was certainly different than what we’re accustomed to in Cobb. So is Boyce’s, whether he runs for re-election in two years or not. Both are Republicans.

What looms ahead remains uncertain. I wonder if 1.7 mills will be enough of an increase to avoid another rough budget process next year. There are efficiencies that have to be considered that Boyce ignored in this budget.

Ott offered some sound spending proposals that deserve attention. Foremost is reforming the county’s existing defined benefit pension plan, which is a ticking time bomb for many governments. SPLOST reform also must be addressed.

More than anything, I hope citizens who participated in the budget battle this summer, both in favor of a tax hike or against, continue to stay active. Their voices and diligence and willingness to question how their money is being spent are needed.

No matter your views on a tax increase, it was encouraging to see such vigorous civic involvement, especially from those who don’t normally speak out.

Before Wednesday’s vote, former Gov. Roy Barnes, who holds a 4-H gala at his Marietta home every fall, said to the commissioners that local government is “government in the raw.”

We may be about to find out what that truly means, even after this grueling summer.

 

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