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An Editorial Series
April 5, 2002

   A few miles off U.S.Highway 78, down a blacktopped lane in the east end of the county known as Fish Hatchery Road, sits a homesite that pains the
eye.

   There, shouting distance from some of the manicured yards and well-kept homes that dominate this area and among the green of loblolly pines, the roll of lush pastures, the din of the teeming nature of rural Alabama, sits: the carcass of an old Toyota pickup; a listing tool shed, a small mountain of garbage; the charred remains of the undefined; paper, Styrofoam and every manner of ugly on this earth, surrounding a fully inhabited dwelling.

   The scar on the landscape does not go unnoticed. Eyeing the foul scene like a housewife glaring at a puppy’s accident on the livingroom carpet, Calhoun County Commissioner Eli Henderson reaches for his cell phone and calls David Pirritano, the environmental enforcement officer for Calhoun County.

   In measured, direct, almost militaristic instructions, Commissioner Henderson dispatches Pirritano, a large, bulky, imposing man — to the scene of the offense.

   “That ought to do it,” says Henderson closing up his phone and scanning for the next eyesore. “David will be out here in a bit, wearing his starched-white shirt, and sporting that big old badge of his,” Henderson growls. “He’ll get them to clean that stuff up right quick. Of course he can’t make them do anything. A pile of garbage isn’t a public nuisance. But we’re banking on the owner not knowing that, aren’t we? It’s called our new enhanced bluff authority.”

   Pirritano’s bluff is also what Commissioner Henderson and many other county commissioners in this state would call “getting by.” Henderson falls back on bluff tactics to get the job done because he is crippled by Alabama’s antiquated 1901 Constitution, a document that grants the state Legislature enormous powers including authority over county governments, such as not giving Commissioner Henderson the go ahead to order someone to clean up a trash heap or garbage-infested lawn.

   Calhoun County does have a law, called the Weed Abatement Bill, that allows the commission to order the cleanup of a property, but the pace for actually getting to the cleanup stage is glacial. Only a few properties have been declared a public nuisance ones much worse than the place on Fish Hatchery Road, but 250 complaints are still outstanding.

   The constitution’s hobbling of county commissioners’ ability to police the rural areas isn’t the half of it. These commissioners are given all the responsibility of governing a county, but no authority.

   Take the county roads for instance. Most everyone here agrees that they are in a world of trouble with more than half of the 989 miles of road in failing condition and 69 of the county’s 161 bridges either restricted or closed. A standard 12-ton school bus is prohibited from crossing 26 of those bridges, adding miles to the commute of school children and money to fuel bills.

   Charles Market, the county engineer, argues that the county should be resurfacing 100 miles of road a year at a cost of $3.5 million and estimates that the replacement cost of the restricted and closed bridges to be around $53 million. That’s a tough order to fill, especially considering that the county’s budget for roads, after salaries and debt service are subtracted, comes to less than $3 million a year.

   But what makes the job even harder is another restriction placed on the counties by the 1901 Alabama Constitution. If Calhoun County wanted to raise revenue to resurface some of these roads or make some of the bridges safe for school buses, the commissioners would have to approach the Legislature to ask for permission to hold a vote in the county on the question.

   Traditionally the commissioners would ask the local delegation to put the question forward in Montgomery, then the question would go to a statewide vote before coming back to Calhoun County for yet another vote. But Calhoun County’s politics and interpersonal relationships have doomed that request to failure for the last 15 years.

   The result has been a county budget so bone-dry that commissioners can hardly find the money to patch the potholes. It is like that in most counties in the state, but the situation is particularly bad in Calhoun County since it is one of only four counties in the state that has neither a countywide gas nor sales tax. That fact trickles down out of the fog of budget line items and into reality very quickly indeed.

   Consider the roadwork that has to take place in Commissioner Henderson’s district alone. He has 318 miles of roads to tend to, “a distance that would easily stretch from here to Gulf Shores,” he is fond of saying.

   In the past year, he has been allocated about enough money for, as Commissioner Henderson says, “to pave about two miles of road.” And that leaves a lot of roadwork left undone at the end of the year. Have a drive through parts of his district sometime and you’ll see the potholes and worn stretches of asphalt sprinkled throughout the area.

   Of course, that doesn’t leave any money for the three bridges that are closed to traffic and the 27 that have weight restrictions.

   It doesn’t leave any money for Commissioner Henderson to “do” for the rural communities in his district. When, for example, residents in the unincorporated Wellborn community asked for his help in building a community park, he “got by.” He worked with Calhoun County Sheriff Larry Amerson who gave him prison labor. He also organized volunteers, used the county road crew and moved around the area raising donations to build the park.

   He does a lot of that kind of thing.

   So Commissioner Henderson and his colleagues here and in other parts of the state get by. They preside over counties that are chronically starved of funds in a cash-starved state. They are beholden to the state Legislature for every decision because the 1901 Constitution makes it so difficult for a county to clean up its rural areas, and raise its own revenue for everything from road building to support for rural schools. In short, they have no power, no money and in essence no authority. Therefore, there is no accountability.

   And that is a scalding contradiction to the South. We loathe outside interference, we despise the dictations of the federal government. Yet we have been happy for 100 years now to let a cluster of lawmakers in Montgomery make every decision for us.

   With David Pirritino’s starched shirt and big badge, a spot of Calhoun County might yet be cleaned up.

   But “that’s just called getting by,” Henderson said. “But if you ask me, I’m getting very, very tired of just getting by all the time.

   “What Calhoun County needs, what all of Alabama needs, is a new constitution, one that will allow for authority to come to county government. That’s the only way we are ever going to be able to get it right. That’s the only way Calhoun County and the state are ever going to be able to move forward.”

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