I received the information pertaining to my open records request yesterday, which included BOC meeting minutes, court exhibits from the condemnation hearings, court transcripts, maps and a copy of the $8,077,000 check used to pay Maxie Price.

In my request I asked for, "all documentation related to the source of the funds paid to acquire the property; by this I do not intend to ask for tax records etc. Rather if special sources such as grants, loans or other financing were used..."

There was no specific mention of where the money came from in the 450 pages I received from the county. So I sent an e-mail to the county employee that put together the request basically asking where the money came from and that was the purpose of my request.

Here is her reply, "Please be advised that we have provided you with all of the financial documents responsive to your request. The $8 million payment came from the County’s General Reserve Fund. It is virtually impossible to determine the source of this fund because it is comprised of various revenue generating sources such as property taxes, sales taxes, etc."

So, I was right. However, that is not nearly the end of the story. Included in 450 pages were the minutes to the July 25, 2005 (pages 4 & 5). There are some very interesting things in these minutes.

The first thing is that the BOC pretty much sacrificed the YMCA for Nash Farm. Here is a relevant portion:

Commissioner Adams directed his question to Mr. Magnaghi, “how are we going to finance this?”

Mr. Magnaghi replied, “it will be financed by impact fees. The figures we reviewed were based upon $11 million; $6 million for this particular project, $5 million for the Y.M.C.A., and a debt incurred over ten (10) years would be approximately $1.3 million. The two (2) combined would be about $1.3 million a year for ten (10) years. That would constitute about 65% of the projected impact fees for the next ten (10) years. This would leave approximately $500,000 a year for additional projects from impact fees.”

Commissioner Stamey asked, “only if we use the Y.M.C.A. money, correct?”

Mr. Magnaghi said, “I keep saying that because the figures have been run on both of these projects, and if we back that out, we said that would constitute about 55% of the $11 million, so the $1.3 million would probably go down to $650,000 for just this project as debt service.”

This is an illegal use of impact fees. The county can pay it's self back for "system improvements intended to be funded by such impact fee." But the uses for impact fees and what a system improvement is are clearly defined in county code.

Now we come to an even more interesting part and I wonder how my friends at the Henry Council for Quality Growth feel about this:

Commissioner Stamey added, “we also talked about on the next SPLOST fund, we could put something in there concerning parks and recreation, and maybe we could create a resolution to allow us for an expansion of parks and recreation and use a portion of the SPLOST money to pay off this early.”

Chairman Harper said he thinks the next SPLOST should have greenspace and park money; he said DeKalb County just developed a SPLOST for that purpose. He said DeKalb is leading the whole State in their Arabia Mountain Project, which is huge with the trail system. “On capital, if we built a new Administration Building today, and in two (2) years pass a SPLOST, we could put on the SPLOST we could retire the debt by putting it on there. I do not know if you can do that on land; I know you can on capital. Also, there is other land we have been considering, and it is a perfect place for a Y.M.C.A.

And I hear that the county is looking to take some sort of legal action against Maxie Price because they feel they overpaid on the original settlement. I've got two highly credible sources on this.

This $8 million should have gone to the real needs of the county. I looked the other way on Nash Farm because I like BJ Mathis but the cost, the violation of private property rights and the continued examples of what is nothing short of stupidity from Mathis and company (Basler and Bowman excluded).

Mathis is up for re-election next year. Voters and taxpayers of District 2, please...for the sake of the county, do not re-elect her. It doesn't stop with Mathis, but it sure as hell starts with her.