The negotiations before signing the Treaty of Trianon in Versailles, 1920. The treaty fixed the new common borders of Hungary with Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. In the middle of the picture, Nikola Pasic of Serbia (with long beard). A Trianoni Békeszerződés aláírása előtti tárgyalások, Versaillesban, 1920-ban. A szerződés Magyarország Ausztriával, Csehszlovákiával, Romániával és Jugoszláviával való új közös határait határozta meg. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Joel:
I’m going to respond to your letter with one of Commission Chairman Jim Sides folksy sayings: “If you want to talk to the horse, talk to the horse’s mouth…” My best advice is to give Jim a call down at his county commission office and he could best explain the limitations of full disclosure until the Mall purchase’s closing date on December 2nd. I say this in the light of disinformation and rumors being spread by a county commissioner and a father and son tag team picturing bad voodoo for the downtown area.
Now the second best choice and not highly recommended is to: “Talk to the horse’s posterior”. That’s where I come in.
The county commissioners are timing the release of full disclosure until after the Mall’s closing date of December 2nd due to a number of practical factors:
• The county’s negotiations with a number of folks affected by the Mall’s change of ownership. Such negotiations will likely lead to a far less costly Mall for our taxpayers.
• The fact that our county commissioners and county manager have not yet fully determined what county offices and storage spaces are going to find a new home at our County Government Plaza.
• The completion of a Phase I Environmental Study.
When all the ink is dry on the December 2nd closing date, the county commissioners will provide full disclosure likely at the 1st Monday meeting in December or at the 2nd meeting in December. At such time everyone in the county will be more than pleasantly surprised by the end result of the negotiations. The new County Government Plaza will likely come in somewhere in the vicinity of 1.7 million dollars instead of the 3.5 million dollar purchase that’s tossed around in media. And downtown’s jitters about the Mall’s purchase denuding their area of county workers in a sudden rush to the County Government Plaza will be eased by the true facts of the matter.
Here’s an analogy about the challenges of full disclosure while fragile negotiations are underway. If we had a group of undercover officers working on busting a narcotics operation we would never broadcast it to the public until the operation was complete. As with some fragile negotiations it is unwise to release information that will tip our hand and in all probability lead to an unwarranted financial loss for our county.
Since I’ve lived here (2008) the county government has demonstrated high transparency, providing important government information upon request or leaving important information on their website. The same can’t be said for the city of Salisbury which regularly fails to respond to Freedom of Information Inquiries, withholds or hides important information about one of their utilities from the public and parades fiction as fact. If someone desires to learn about Salisbury’s operations they need to diligently study their budgets and develop a network of city employees, insider sources, and former employees to learn what’s “under the hood” of the city and its operations.
Your best bet to obtain a fuller explanation is to go straight to the horse’s mouth and make that call. Otherwise we’ll need to delay gratification on full disclosure until after the closing date of December 2nd.
We live in an imperfect world and transparency gratification sometimes needs to be delayed.
Take care, Steve
The Joel Johnson Letter:
