The melodrama that is Anderson County Council

Tuesday night ended any hope of Anderson County Council moving on and addressing a real conservative agenda to bring the county through the current economic hard times. Most normal political activists would assume that a new conservative county council would have first on its mind things like tax relief, economic development incentives for businesses to invest or to provide some sort of budget reform that would allow for infrastructure needs to be addressed and wasteful spending cut.

However, Anderson County Council's brand of conservatives are not normal. The first thing on their minds in their first meeting Tuesday night was to spend tens of thousands of tax payer dollars hiring a lawyer and an accountant to investigate the previous council and administrator. That is what seems the most important thing to them. They seemed not concerned with cutting taxes, or getting jobs for the people they serve. Instead, they want to get even with old political opponents at the taxpayer's expense. Their actions are right out of the liberal playbook and smack of the melodrama usually reserved for daytime soap opera programming.

The Anderson County Council did hire two upstanding individuals with the tens of thousands of taxpayer money in attorney Billy Wilkins of Nexon Pruet and accountant Robert Daniels of Greene and Company. However, even if those two fine men find wrongdoing, it is telling about how much the current council actually cares about the county's people in that their first priority in an economic crisis is to spend money going after old enemies.

If no major wrongdoing is found, than Cindy Wilson, Bob Waldrep Eddie Moore, Tom Allen and Tommy Dunn will see the end to their political careers. Rarely does any politician so quickly ignore the evident concerns of his constituents in exchange for favor from a narrow base. One would think Cindy Wilson would want to do something about how Honea Path's only recent economic development is parked train cars. One would think Tom Allen would find a way that an important economic development project like the recent ICAR bolt to Laurens county does not happen again. This list goes on. The only people more politically tone deaf than the current council are the ones that were defeated in June.

Do not misunderstand me. It was time for Joey Preston to go as Administrator. Every council member who lost re-election last June had it coming to them for their vote for a tax increase. However, I had hoped, for my home county's sake, and for the sake of the thousands of people who live and work in Anderson County, that the new council would focus not on their old enemies but on showing how conservative local government can work even in trying times. The first meeting of the new council showed my hopes were in vain. The current county council is just as bitter and vain as the last and just as determined to spend taxpayer money going after their enemies as the last. What a sad melodrama. Maybe the county can make up for the money they will spend going after their enemies by turning county government into some sort of reality show.