Habersham Commission Chairman Bruce Palmer held his third town hall meeting Tuesday night. The meeting centered around public works, from their duties in the county to the challenges they’re currently facing.
The public works town hall was marked by a record-low turnout for one of Palmer’s meetings, but Palmer says even with a small audience, he was still glad to get the information out.
“Public works isn’t a very popular topic,” Palmer said. “It’s not like taxes, for example. Everybody’s concerned about taxes. Whenever I did that one, that was probably the biggest turnout that I had, because it’s a concern that’s shared by everybody. But I’m getting information out; people are seeing it, whether they’re here, whether they’re watching it on the livestream or whether they go back and watch it later.”
The meeting highlighted challenges faced by the road department and landfill, which were mostly caused by outdated infrastructure. Palmer says that the county’s roads and bridges are behind on updates, and many county roads and bridges are in need of repair. He also discussed how the county landfill is approaching capacity.
RELATED: Habersham landfill could be full in the next 15 years
Roads Department Superintendent Steve Worley says that on the road department’s end, they’re receiving more work orders than they can handle.
“In nine working days, we had 67 work orders come in,” Worley tells Now Habersham. He said the scope of work of nine of those orders were two-week jobs. “That’s two weeks’ worth of work with a full crew, and that full crew right now is four people.”
He says the roads department has to “do the best they can” to try to meet the needs of the county, keeping their roads and bridges in the best shape possible with the resources they have.
The meeting didn’t just focus on those topics though: Palmer went over the county’s proposed TSPLOST once again, discussing how the additional one-percent sales tax could benefit Habersham’s citizens by improving county roads and bridges while freeing up SPLOST dollars for other county projects.
With their long list of work orders to take care of, Public Works Director Jerry Baggett and Worley both believe TSPLOST, also referred to as the “roads and bridges SPLOST,” would help them with their departments’ needs.
“That’s why we would like to see the roads and bridges SPLOST pass,” Baggett said. “Then we would be able to hire more and have another crew and get more equipment.”
While a SPLOST cannot pay salaries, Worley says being able to cover many of the department’s general fund expenditures, such as replacing outdated equipment, would free up funds for them to hire more staff. With that additional staff, they could take care of roads and bridges projects that have been on the county’s to-do list since the last TSPLOST referendum failed in 2018.
“Believe it or not, we have projects from the 2018 project list that have still not been completed,” Palmer said. “Why haven’t those things been done? Lack of funding. This is a way to fund those things.”
Watch Palmer’s public works town hall meeting
