Absence of zoning hurts our community — By Tommy Purser

I remember well a time in the late 1970s — or maybe it was the early 1980s — when I was covering a county commission meeting …. something I’ve done in Jeff Davis County for more than 50 years.
The late Cicero Fowler was chairman of the commission and the late Charlie Carter represented what was then the Hazlehurst District. A problem came up that none of the five commissioners knew what they needed to do to handle the problem.
It wasn’t that they couldn’t agree on a solution but, rather, none of them knew what to do.
So, and this is what I remember so well, Cicero turned to Charlie and said, “Charlie, that’s in your district, you make the decision.”
And that was the beginning of the division of Jeff Davis County into five “mini-counties,” with each commissioner becoming interested primarily in what “their” district’s needs were, “their” neighbors’ needs were, “their” mini-county’s needs were and less interested in the needs of the county as a whole.
Decades later, the commissioners made the decision to divide up Local Maintenance and Improvement Grant (LMIG) funds equally between each district, or mini-county. I shook my head at the time at how unprogressive that decision was. I thought at the time, and still think today, that the commission is tasked with handling the needs of the entire county as a whole and all the commissioners should, as a group, look after the entire county’s needs, not the needs of their own little fiefdoms.
I believe that, rather than dividing up the LMIG funds equally between each district, the funds should be used to address Jeff Davis County’s greatest needs. If the need is greatest in one area, rather than in other areas, then the LMIG funds should be used to address the county’s greatest needs — the entire county’s greatest needs, not the greatest needs in any particular district.
It seems to me that no one on the commission, for decades, has looked at the county as a whole to determine what our needs are county-wide.
A few months back, the current commissioners made the decision to allocate LMIG funds based on the number of miles of paved roads in each district, as LMIG funds are used to maintain paved roads, not dirt roads.
At first glance, that seems like a good idea. But it is based on the premise that each commissioner is tasked with looking after his own district and not the county as a whole. And basing the distribution of funds on the number of miles of paved roads, again, doesn’t take into consideration what the greatest needs of our county as a whole are. If one district has greater road improvement needs than another, then the money should be spent where the greatest needs are, not divided up based on any criteria other than need.
And getting back to the idea that our county commission has, historically, divided our county into five mini-counties, anyone who doubts that should have been at last week’s county commission meeting when some of the commissioners kept talking about “my money,” “my district,” my, my, my, my.
What ever happened to “our” county? That disappeared decades ago based on a simple, yet profound, conversation between Cicero Fowler and Charlie Carter.
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Last week’s county commission meeting room was filled with citizens of the Tallahassee Missionary Baptist Church area. Those citizens were understandably upset with what has happened in their community. A virtual junkyard has sprung up in what is obviously a residential neighborhood.
There are plenty of people to blame for that problem. They are the county commissioners who have served in office for the last five decades, excluding most of the current county commissioners but not all. I’ve said this before and it bears repeating again: when I first moved to Jeff Davis County 50 years ago, I was surprised by the fact the county had no county-wide zoning, no county-wide building codes — other than state building codes — and no county-wide code enforcement officer.
Today, there are still no county-wide zoning, no county-wide building codes and no county-wide code enforcement officer.
When I first brought up the need for county-wide building codes, one of the commissioners at the time, a farmer, said he wasn’t about to tell his fellow farmers what they could and could not do when constructing buildings on their land.
“But what about their neighbors?” I asked. “What if a tornado drops down on a poorly constructed farm structure and rips apart loose boards and debris and sends them crashing into neighboring homes, perhaps killing or injuring innocent people?”
My argument left him unimpressed.
But, back to the Tallahassee Church area problem. In my opinion, unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much the commission can do now in the absence of county-wide zoning. With no zoning, people can build whatever they want to, wherever they want to, with virtually no resistance.
And just so any reader outside the city limits of Hazlehurst feel that the Tallahassee Church community’s problem is “their” problem and not yours, the same thing can happen anywhere in the county outside of the City of Hazlehurst.
The city, in which I live, does have zoning. And what is happening in the Tallahassee Church residential community cannot happen in my neighborhood because the city enforces its zoning laws.
So no matter where you live in Jeff Davis County, don’t think what has happened in the Tallahassee Church Community can’t happen to you.
You don’t believe me? Just ask those people whose properties have been invaded by solar farms.
With county-wide zoning, neither problem would have ever happened.