Jackson Progress-Argus

By Michael Davis

mdavis@myjpa.com

While they did agree on the nominees, members of the Butts County Board of Commissioners didn't agree on when to vote on a slate of appointees to various local boards and authorities.

The Board of Commissioners took up the appointments during the last meeting of the year -- a special-called meeting held Dec. 20 -- and the last one until outgoing Commissioner Mitchell McEwen leaves office and incoming member Mike Patterson assumes the post.

With McEwen absent from the meeting, Vice Chairman Roger McDaniel conducted the meeting, and voted with District 1 Commissioner G.S. "Gator" Hodges to delay the appointments until Patterson takes office.

District 2 Commissioner Robert L. Henderson, Sr., and District 4 Commissioner Keith Douglas voted against Hodges' motion to table the appointments, meaning that the motion failed on a tie.

It was a rare split vote for the board, which has largely shown unanimity throughout much of this year.

In his motion to delay the appointments until the first meeting of 2011, Hodges said his reasoning was "not only to do a little bit more research due to the gravity of the appointments, but also to allow our next commissioner to join us before making them."

The Board of Commissioners, however, proceeded to make a series of appointments on unanimous votes with little discussion, to boards including the Department of Family and Children Services and the Butts County Development Authority.

The Board of Commissioners did, however, skip an appointment to the local Board of Health on the recommendation of Butts County Administrator Alan White, who said the appointee from the commission is currently the chairman of the board, McEwen, and that the board's next chairman may choose to defer the position to another commissioner.

Commissioners are expected to elect the board's chairman from among its members at the first meeting in January.

Commissioners made the following unanimous appointments on Dec. 20:

* Raynard Smith to the Department of Family and Children Services board.

* Christy Anderson to the board of the Three Rivers Regional Council.

* Bruce Bartholomew and Larry Morgan to the Butts County Development Authority.

* Nita Spraggins and Johnny Smith to the Board of Tax Assessors.

* Christopher Cleveland to the Board of Zoning Appeals.

White asked the Board of Commissioners to take up an appointment to the county's Board of Adjustments and Appeals in January, after he clarifies the length of one member's term.

Douglas and Henderson both said they wanted to vote on the appointments last week because they were on the agenda for the meeting. Henderson cited the volume of work that lay ahead of the next board in January.

"We kind of had discussed that we were going to wait, then it got on the agenda and I wasn't going to let it just keep flip-flopping back," Henderson said. "We had a lot of things we were going to handle in January anyway, a lot of things that we needed to deal with. We're already having two meetings in January so we already had a lot of things to take place, so these were some things we could get out of the way."

The commission is planning to meet over two days in Atlanta, in January, in part to hear from economic development officials.

"It was already on the agenda so we went on and carried on out with it," Douglas said of the appointments. "It was on there, so it's business."