One of my favorite Claude Kirk stories is that time he went to the paper mill town of Perry and its mayor apologized to Florida’s first modern Republican governor because…
…well because Perry, being a paper mill town, stank to high heaven.
“Don’t apologize,” Claude told the mayor. “Why that’s the smell of money.”
The good news is that Perry no longer reeks of paper mill stench.
The bad news is that Perry smells better because the paper mill smell of money is gone.
Especially since Georgia Pacific closed a plant that paid more than 500 employees a total of something like $71 million in annual salaries.
Not to mention the multiple millions in taxes it rendered unto Perry and Taylor County.
Perry is these days a city in distress. And when its city manager asked local legislators how Perry could get some state assistance, he was told, as per the Tallahassee Democrat “You really need a lobbyist up here in Tallahassee.”
Wait! What?
A town that can’t afford to repair its roads or fix its aging wastewater plant system must now go out and hire a lobbyist if it wants some help from the Legislature.
But Perry is a red city. In a red county. In a red state.
I get it that lawmakers would rather see blue GNV dry up and blow away than do us a solid. But Perry?
The truth is that our red Legislature hates cities. So does our red governor. Seldom a session passes without lawmakers and the Gov. putting additional restrictions on the ability of local governments to, well, govern.
The highjacking of Gainesville’s city-owned utility is just an extreme example of the Legislature’s hatred of cities. Last year a whole bunch of small town elected officials – some of them serving for next to nothing – resigned after the Legislature placed new financial disclosure requirements on them.
Anyway, the Florida Legislature is nothing if not transactional. State bidness simply does get done unless somebody can make some money on the side from it.
In any case, it’s difficult to see what sort of relief the Leg would be prepared to deliver to Perry.
Yeah, it’s a red city. But it’s a small city. In the middle of nowhere. And it’s not like the Republicans are gonna lose tons of votes if they don’t rescue Perry – folks up there mostly vote red because they hate government almost as much as they hate politicians.
There’s always this
The Legislature’s time honored idea of economic development for rural Florida is to build a new prison out in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, these days Florida’s sprawling prison system is a big, hot mess. And if anything, fixing it is going to require prison closings and consolidations rather than expansion.
Or maybe this?
But here’s something our red Legislature and our red Congress could collaborate on:
The Big T is promising the mass deportation of illegal immigrants on Day 1. But you can’t just round ‘em up and put them on cattle cars to Mexico or whatever other “SH” country (as the Big T would say) they ran away from.
Nah, it’s gonna take some time to get Mexico, not to mention the rest of the world, to agree to take ‘em all back.
And in the meantime….Well, you gotta warehouse ‘em somewhere. And Taylor County and Perry (i.e. the pine tree capital of Florida) has nothing if not a lot of empty somewhere.
Heck, maybe we could even buy the old Georgia Pacific plant and turn it into a compound for the, um, temporarily displaced. Win-win!
Say, here’s an idea
You know how cities are always calling themselves laboratories of democracy? Yeah, I know, that’s why GOP pols hate cities…somehow their democracy experiments always tend to lean progressive. If not downright liberal.
But here’s a chance for GOPsters to turn Perry into a laboratory of, if not democracy, at least good old American conservative ideas.
Government is bad, right? So why not let the free market succeed where Perry’s elected elite have obviously failed?
Privatize Perry.
Let the highest bidder do what the city council used to do. If some company’s bottom line depended on rooting out government waste I guarantee you Perry, not to mention the company, would run on a profit.
Water and sewer? Privatize it. Public safety? Corporations are already running prisons. So why not left ‘em profit from the front end of the dropout-to-prison pipeline as well? Dog catcher? Heck, somebody will do it for a few bucks.
The reds hate welfare. But they love corporate welfare.
Profitable Perry. Yeah, it’s got a ring to it.
But seriously. I’m getting real tired of solving The Free State Of Floriduh’s problems for The Great DeSanitizer.
FreeGNV 