A crowd was expected at the Buncombe County Commissioners’ meeting tonight. For the most part, it was comprised of the usual suspects. The draw almost implied only a dozen people in Buncombe County are paying attention and care enough to take time off work to help guide public policy. The preferred course of action appears to be to engage in tough talk around the water cooler ranging from, “You don’t want me to go to those meetings because I’d set every one of them straight,” to, “There’s no point in going, the votes are already decided behind closed doors.”
The issue was commissioner compensation. Through diligence and persistence, Mike Fryar was able to run down some leads and discover the commissioners were getting much more than others in the state for technology and transportation perks. After the local daily jumped on the matter with a series of articles, a resolution was added to the already-published consent agenda for the commissioners’ next meeting. It proposed dropping biweekly compensation from $650 to $320 for transportation and from $175 to $25 for modern communication devices.
It may well have been the first successful instance of fiscal conservative activism in Buncombe County in at least eight years. One could tell Fryar had been successful when everybody else started taking credit for his work. In fact, Jerry Rice called Matt Mittan’s show today to give credit to the John Locke Foundation for putting pressure on the local daily to print what it did. (More poignantly, Rice encouraged listeners to focus more on the county’s big-ticket capital improvement projects than the current chicken feed.)
And yet the crowd was not happy. As folks began assembling for the meeting, Mittan was saying something over the airwaves about the commissioners not really taking a pay cut. Because the item was on the consent agenda, there was no public comment before it passed. People who came to comment on the matter were declared out of order for trying to ask for some time at the microphone. When the extra-long meeting was finally over, citizens expressed their desires that the commissioners or other staff members would give more. Fryar called attention to three majors in the sheriff’s department that would be getting a pay raise of $12,819 this year. Sheriff Van Duncan rebutted, saying his department was phasing in market-based pay. After all, in City Hall, it is considered a bad thing to train officers only to see them leave for better pay elsewhere. Duncan said he is considering offering himself a pay cut.
The following conversation took place as people left the chambers. The names have been withheld to protect the belligerent.
“Thanks for letting the truth be heard.”
“What truth?”
“They couldn’t even tell the truth if they took truth serum.”
