Commissioner Bruce Palmer held his second town hall meeting Tuesday night, where he was joined by public safety department heads from Habersham County Emergency Services, Sheriff’s Office and Animal Care and Control.
Department heads shared the challenges they’re facing in their public safety departments during Palmer’s informational presentation, which detailed the costs of running local public safety operations, upcoming projects and staffing information. The department heads were also available to answer questions from citizens.
Palmer says that his public safety experience helped him prepare for the presentation.
“Even though my experience has primarily been fire and EMS, I still knew a lot about law enforcement and 911, and even animal control from working with them on different types of calls,” Palmer said. “There wasn’t as much of a learning curve as there was for the first one [town hall] over taxes and tax digests.”
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He says he believes that these meetings are helping community members become acquainted with their local government officials, and he says that being able to present information to and answer questions from citizens is helping overall government transparency.
“You’re not ever going to make everybody happy, but when you have people taking interest that ask legitimate questions, I think that’s the whole goal,” Palmer said. “The whole goal is to open conversation with our citizens because through that conversation, I think that’s where we get a lot more transparency from.”
Discussions and questions from citizens centered around area animal population control, improving public safety staffing, long emergency response times and the safety and improvement of the county jail. The public safety department heads directly involved in those issues were able to answer those questions and provide insight into what plays into those citizen concerns.
Only a handful of community members attended the town hall in person, but the county’s online livestream had 369 viewers during the initial livestream. The stream is still available for viewing on the county’s Facebook page.
VIEW Recorded Livestream of HABCO Public Safety Town Hall
Habersham County Public Information Officer Carolyn Gibson says that the engagement she’s seen with the community during these meetings shows the town halls’ beneficial impact.
“It creates an opportunity for discussions that may not happen elsewhere,” Gibson tells Now Habersham. She also hopes that recording the initial livestream will be helpful for dispersing more information to citizens in the future. “The great thing about filming this is we can use this information in other informational campaigns.”
VIEW Slide presentation from HABCO Public Safety Town Hall
Now Habersham will release more information on the topics discussed at the public safety town hall in the near future.
