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February 9, 2012

Commission to decide soon on Dalton, Whitfield merger

Charles Oliver charlesoliver@daltoncitizen.com

Whitfield County residents will soon know whether they will be voting in November on merging the county and city of Dalton general governments.

A commissione created by the General Assembly has spent the past seven months studying such a merger, and a subcommittee of the commission is currently preparing its report.

“It’s difficult to get our arms around all of the information we’ve gathered over the past seven months and put that into a report,” said commission Chairman Frank Thomason. “But we’ve got some good folks working on this, and I feel confident the final report will be a good one.”

On Wednesday, members of that subcommittee met to go over the outline of that report and to divide the work among themselves and other members of the commission.

• Whitfield County Board of Commissioners Chairman Mike Babb and Dalton City Council member George Sadosuk will prepare a statement on city and county employees.

• Dalton businessmen Phil Neff, chairman of the subcommittee, and David Renz will prepare the statement on Dalton Utilities.

• Board of Commissioners member Gordon Morehouse and Varnell City Council member David Owens and will prepare a statement on public works.

• Babb and Renz will prepare a statement on fire protection.

• Neff and Sadosuk will prepare a statement on law enforcement.

• Former Probate Judge Ray Broadrick and Morehouse will prepare a statement on administration.

• Broadrick and Owens will prepare a statement on parks and recreation.

Dalton attorney Celeste Creswell and Dalton businesswoman Tangela Johnson will then turn   those statements into a report.

“We will meet again in two weeks and present that report to the full committee for discussion and review. We will make any changes that we need to make and then present that final report to the public,” said Neff.

Commission members will decide whether to recommend a complete combining of the two governments, a partial merger or no merger at all.

If they recommend a full merger of the two governments, it would then draft a charter for the new consolidated government. The legislation that created the merger commission mandates it would be placed on the ballot this November in the general election. A majority of voters in both the city of Dalton and Whitfield County as a whole would have to approve that charter for the merger to take place.

The commission could also recommend simply merging various departments. The Dalton City Council and the Whitfield County Board of Commissioners would have to decide whether to act on those recommendations.

“I’m beginning to feel more comfortable about this than I was a couple of weeks ago. But, and maybe this is just my years in elected office, I keep coming back to the point that nothing matters if voters won’t vote for this,” said Babb. “So I keep looking further downstream and wondering what concerns and questions voters will have when they step into the voting booth. We have to address their concerns.”

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