These are my observations on the Republican Party meet and greet held Feb 7th in McKee. If you don’t count the candidates and their families there were very few citizens of Jackson County present. Why is that? Did the citizens not know about the event? Is this not important enough to attend?
Some candidates, when speaking about grants, used the term “free money”, do they not know any better than this? There is no “free money”, every penny that the state or federal government gives away in grant money comes from the taxpayers' pocket. The government has no money. They use your money. Grants are good if used for a legitimate need, but they are not “free money”.
Tourism was talked about by a lot of the candidates; a lot of people think that tourism is going to fix everything, when the reality is that tourism is just a small egg in what should be a big basket. For tourism to help anything, we need to get the tourists’ money. The hikers and bikers spend little money in Jackson County. There are probably carloads of people coming through Jackson County every summer to see our county, but where are they going to spend their money? There is little here that would entice these tourist’s out of their money. We need more small businesses. Here is where the leaders of our county could actually help. Jackson County’s occupational tax rate is the 8th highest rate in the state; 112 counties have a lower rate, and only 7 have a higher rate. Ask yourself, why would a small business would want to open in Jackson County with this tax rate? The leaders of our county could fix this easily.
A lot of candidates were talking about a vision for the future; this is good, we need a vision for the future, but we need a realistic vision. Vision is good as long as it is grounded in reality. The problem with unrealistic vision is that you waste all your time reaching for something that is unreachable and miss the things that are reachable. It’s like a person playing the lottery hoping for a big win, the smart people work daily and they hit the jackpot. I even heard a candidate speaking about a Walmart in Jackson County, that is unrealistic vision, Walmart isn’t coming to Jackson County because of this simple reason, there aren’t enough people here. We need leaders that will work daily on our problems not wait on the lottery. Rush Limbaugh’s words echo through my mind when he would say “I’m the mayor of Realville”. We need leaders who understand this.
Michael Sandlin
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here