“There’s a Financial Crisis in Our Country”

Fred Dorsey, 81, quit the Henderson County Parks and Recreation Board in protest of misguided spending. He believed $750,000 should be transferred to the Board of Education for paying educator salaries, or at least spent on park service personnel.

“I told (the board), ‘You don’t realize that there’s a financial crisis in our country, and we have to let things like paving and soccer fields take a back seat for a while and let the employees and the teachers get paid before we think about those.’ ”

Parks and Recreation Director Tim Hopkin disagreed. The funds were coming out of the current budget, and improvements are overdue – for safety purposes. Board Chair Jeff Donaldson argued the funds were allocated and not taken from anybody else. Donaldson and Dorsey had a falling out when Donaldson voiced his suspicions that Dorsey was “not really a recreation advocate.”