WDNC about rewarding bad behavior

Darla McCorkle

As some of you may be aware Hugh and I are looking at leaving Jefferson. Let me correct that, I am looking at leaving Jefferson and I really hope Hugh and Atticus will join me. 

This week’s city council meeting convinced me that I can no longer live here. 

Over 20 years ago I started sleeping with Hugh. We met in Texarkana. He had started a life here. Had a bed and breakfast. Seemed to really like it here. I had moved from Houston to Texarkana and was sorta just in between what I wanted to do. Do I stay in Texas? Do I go back to North Carolina? I just didn’t know. All my stuff was in storage. I met Hugh and it became the norm for me to come to Jefferson on my days off. Between the trains and the clock that chimed every damn hour I wasn’t sure I was gonna keep sleeping with him, at least not at his house. Eventually,  I got used to the trains and took the battery out of the clock. A couple of years passed and we had a family and stayed. 

I’ve witnessed some stupid stuff happen in Jefferson. I’ve seen three city administrators be paid large sums to leave. I’ve had CPS show up at my door after I complained about our local government. The person who emailed CPS believes they were anonymous. I’ve watched city hall crumble and different officials come in and out of Hugh’s office dumping dirt about closed sessions all while saying, “you didn’t hear this from me.”  

I’m done with the constant stupidity. I’m done with things like this beautification buy out that happened Tuesday  night. 

Property owner A has property at the end of a dead end street. The street is maintained by the city and other owners utilize it. Property owner B is adjacent to Property owner A and decided to build a structure across the dead end street barring Property Owner A from using the street to access her property. Owner A built structures on property that is not hers. What should happen in a normal city is Owner B would have been told to remove the structures off city property. Instead, we voted to buy the structure making it city owned and for Owner B to maintain them. Owner B is in her 90s so I’m not sure how much longer she’ll be able to maintain the now city owned structures. 

But the other question is why are we again asking citizens to take care of city things. Didn’t they just agree that citizens shouldn’t be asked to foot the bill for water projects? Also, don’t we get a say before they spend money like that? If they wanted to beautify a neighborhood, proper format would be putting the matter on an agenda. Especially when closing access to a property from a city road! Doing what they did forfeited  other citizens and property owners  the  chance to go to the meeting to scream about it. I would’ve gone to that meeting and said, “why are we building a garden on a dead end street when we can’t take care of our other streets?” Or maybe someone would’ve screamed about spending money to beautify ONE SINGLE dead end street with a handful of houses instead of taking care of an already established city park. But this isn’t about the city wanting to pretty up anything. This is about not wanting to make a friend abide by the law.

So they backed themselves into owning these planter boxes all because they didn’t want to make an old woman, who built a structure on property that didn’t belong to her, move it. They spent our money to buy it, and given Jefferson’s history, when this woman can no longer care for it, it’ll crumble right where it stands. 

This is the crap I hope to be blissfully unaware of in our new home wherever that may be. In the meantime, I have a 10K square foot building up for grabs.