WAYNE CO.—We’ve stopped covering a lot of Wayne County news. Not because there isn’t any there, but because, well…people are just kinda crazy there.
I can say that, because I’m FROM there.
But I can prove it with this story.
Here’s the explanation for the photo below.
Several weeks ago, someone got ol Tommy Mathews (at the Wayne County Press, the county’s only print media, which, as you can imagine, is largely the problem…there’s only ONE) to bitchin about one of our circuit’s associate judges, Mark Stanley of White County, plugging in his electric car at the courthouse.
Tommy whined because that’s “using the county’s electricity” and the judge was “already on the county’s dime” etcetera etcetera etcetera. You know, things he DOESN’T do under ordinary circumstances or under cases of REAL theft of county services. (Tommy suffers from a lot of….ahem…’envies.’ He envies things he doesn’t have—which is one of the reasons he detests Jack so much, but we won’t go there—and I truly think he envies Stanley that he’s got an electric car when Tommy drives a gas-sucking corvette, last I’d heard. Sucks to be him.)
Either Tommy was whining because of a county board member whining to him, or he caught the ear of a county board member. Whatever the case, there are way too many of those (county board member) in Wayne, 14 in all, the voters a coupla years ago wanted half but no one managed to get a binding referendum on the ballot. We don’t know which board member it was, but I imagine we’ll find out. The board member got to whining too, and started actually raising hell with the county, wanting to know just how much electricity Stanley was using.
It was all supposed to come to an ugly head at the next county board meeting, which I think is tonight; I lose track of these things since we largely ignore Wayne.
But there’s just one problem with all the whining.
Stanley has paid for his electricity…at least an estimated amount. And what you see above is the payment for six months’ worth. He doesn’t use much electricity. That’s the beauty of those cars; and he only comes to Wayne on a conflict. Hell, we see him in Richland more than they do in Wayne, I think.
He was intending on going to the county board meeting and confronting the county board with this. The accusations are a little ridiculous, and apparently, they’re enough to tick him off. And who can blame him? It was easily resolved…we just went to Treasurer Donna Vaughn’s office today and got a copy of the check (we cut off the bank numbers.) Why couldn’t Tommy do that? Why couldn’t the county board member do that? Did they, and they just wanted to cause drama anyway?
Which is why we don’t cover stuff in Wayne County. Because they WANT the drama. They WANT the crap the county board pulls (they keep re-electing them, after all). They WANT Tommy whining over ridiculous things and not effecting change. And they WANT to make sure no one else talks about it but just the locals.
So they can have it. But we just thought you’d like to see how silly it all is…and why we don’t mess with it any more.