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Stew Lilker’s

Columbia County Observer

Real news for working families.

Opinion
from the publisher

Ellisville - Like the Plague - Is Spreading

The Columbia County Ellisville Utility Boondoggle continues to spread like the plague. In the early 2000’s, Columbia County's good old boys thought the county’s water and sewer pipes were filled with gold. Any five year old could have told them that sewer pipes are filled with anything but gold. In one colossal waste of money after the next, the county management flushed tens and tens of thousands of dollars down the drain while dancing in utility dark. Following in the footsteps of the Williams Bros. County Jail Fiasco, at every opportunity they had to do something right - they did it the Columbia County way - wrong.

In 2007, the good old boys, with the taste of OPM, pronounced "opium," the acronym for "other people's money," on their minds, went after the county's private utilities and their customers by quietly passing an ordinance, in which they took over jurisdiction of the County’s private utilities from the Public Service Commission.

Understandably and in character, after enacting the ordinance, they forgot to tell anybody and then went into good old boy amnesia and forgot about the ordinance themselves. The wheeling, dealing and well drilling at Ellisville was evidentially taking all of their utility time.

For the legendary Columbia County top brass – one screw up is never enough.

The long term continuing fiasco at Ellisville, which collectively screwed all the county residents, obviously wasn't sufficient for the bungling-bumbling County Commission. Columbia County now has the Private Utility Boondoggle rising to the top of the charts.

With the bottomless pit of the county's working family tax dollars drying up, it is time the hollow cry of "We in the utility business," by the infamous Cow Dung Caballero, County Commissioner Ronald Williams, be revisited with some real world cost benefit analysis, a term so foreign on the county side of the street that it might as well be from King Tut's Tomb.

Contrary to the top Columbia County brass, the term "cost benefit analysis" along with its sister term "feasibility study" are terms not known only to Lake City Manager Wendell Johnson and the Lake City Council. They are terms known throughout most of the civilized world. If Columbia County's good old boys decide to sign up for membership, that fact should become readily apparent.

Top on the list of this Tuesday's County Utility Committee agenda, a committee chaired by another of the Cow Dung Caballeros, Commissioner and Jack Berry protégé, Jody, "we don't need no 'market place of ideas' here" DuPree, should be, "We don't need and the working families of this county can't afford to be in the Private Utility regulating business."

To the untrained mind this is readily apparent. For the County Commission, the idea that "We don't need to be in the private utility regulating business," should be a slam dunk.

This work by the Columbia County Observer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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