It's about cutting off money to the State Patrol
Barton: Leaders butt heads, little guys get trampled
There's an old African proverb: When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.
Meet David Starnes Sr. and his son, David Jr.
They are the grass.
Meet Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue and the Georgia Legislature.
They are the two elephants.
And since Perdue is Republican, just like House Speaker Glenn Richardson and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, who presides over the Senate, the elephant imagery is appropriate.
So is the head-butting. When the curtain came down with a clunk in April on this year's session of the Georgia Legislature, Perdue and Richardson weren't on speaking terms. The reasons, as always, were power and money.
This battle is continuing. Money that the legislature approved for individual state departments, which are under the governor's thumb, isn't being spent as lawmakers directed. Boss's orders. And Perdue shows no sign of backing down.
For Georgians who care little about state politics, the Perdue-Georgia Legislature fight is like a laxative commercial on TV.
You tune it out because you think it will never concern you.
Bad idea. Here are two reasons why: Starnes Sr., and Starnes Jr.
There but for the grace of God could be any of us.
On May 13, David Starnes Jr., a professor who taught writing and linguistics at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, left Savannah in his white Ford Taurus and headed west on I-16 toward the campus. It was a Sunday. The 64-year-old educator, who had scores of friends in Savannah, had made this trip hundreds of times.
Not today.
Near Bloomingdale in west Chatham County, a BMW that was headed the wrong way in the westbound lane of traffic hit Starnes head on. Georgia State Patrol investigators said later that the BMW's driver, Rhonda Jan Bonetto, 48, a Florida woman, made a U-turn into the wrong lane. She drove for several miles before the fatal collision.
Starnes was killed. Bonetto was critically injured but survived.
Given the facts as presented by troopers, this accident isn't overly complicated. A woman was driving the wrong way. She killed someone. Luckily, she lived.
Even Barney Fife could figure much of it out. Fortunately, the State Patrol doesn't have One-Bullet Barney on its crack unit that investigates fatal crashes, called the Specialized Collision Reconstruction Team.
Unfortunately, the SCRT is horribly understaffed. So is the entire State Patrol. It can't even patrol the highways after midnight.
Because of this hole in the patrol, a crash investigation that might ordinarily take several months to complete, such as the wreck that took the life of Starnes, probably will take more than a year.
That's unacceptable.
This isn't the Kennedy assassination. It's a wrong-way driver on I-16.
The state Board of Public Safety, which oversees the State Patrol learned in April that the patrol was 195 troopers short of its authorized total of 953. That's up from 180 vacancies a year ago.
Like the woman driving the BMW, the Georgia State Patrol is heading the wrong way, too.
Lawmakers appropriated $8 million this year to help the State Patrol plug vacancies and reduce attrition. But as the elephants fought, that money was redirected into Perdue's black hole.
David Starnes Sr. will be 84 on Aug. 20. He was born in the west Savannah neighborhood of Hudson Hill, but grew up in Atlanta. He served in the Navy during World War II and the Korean War, and he worked for the U.S. Post Office, Customs Service and Border Patrol.
Starnes and his wife, Jacqueline, live in Annandale, Va., near Washington, D.C. Both are anguished by their son's death. Both are in poor health as well, although they hope to travel to Statesboro on Sept. 14 to attend a memorial service for the son at Georgia Southern.
"David was more than just a son," Starnes told me last week. "He was my best friend and hero. We had a mutual admiration society between us - he proclaimed I was his hero."
The ex-Navy man hopes to live along enough to see the case of his son's death adjudicated. But because the State Patrol is short-handed, that may not happen. And because two big elephants are fighting in Atlanta, the wheels of justice will continue to grind slowly in future cases as well.
The Sunday that Starnes was killed was Mother's Day. David's mother had been waiting in Virginia for a phone call from her son in Georgia, offering her his best wishes.
Instead, she got a knock on her front door by a Fairfax County police officer.
Yes, elephants are big. And yes, it's the little guys who live in the grasses - guys like David Starnes Senior and Junior - who get stomped when elephants fight.
But real elephants today are in danger of extinction because of a lot of little guys. Perdue and top lawmakers should remember that as their head-butting continues.
Tom Barton is the editorial page editor of the Savannah Morning News. His e-mail address is tom.barton@savannahnow.com [1].
1 comment:
Very clearly, this story is about cutting off funding to the State Patrol.
The only comment added by the blog to the story notes this.
Anyone who thinks this post or story trivialized the life and death of any individual is mistaken.
Doing the right thing hurts worse in the short run than doing the wrong thing. Doing the wrong thing pays off in more pain over the long run.
This blog as noted in disclaimers is not a political vehicle for any organization.
No matter how painful it is for people to face, politicians make daily decisions to run the government, often making those decisions for very poor personal or partisan reasons.
Perdue, I could care less about the man. Georgia and all the innocent people in it are my concern.
All the people in Georgia have been placed at risk by the self-serving power struggle under the Gold Dome.
That power struggle over the budget is causing hazards no one needs to face alone.
This story from Savannah merely gives a real world example of how a few people are horribly hurt for no better reason than the political ambition of a former Democrat turned Republican Governor who has aspirations for the White House.
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