Run Carl, Run!

originally published June 4, 2008

Carl Jordan is unique among Athens-Clarke County Commissioners. If you don’t believe it, just look at all the nine-to-one votes where he’s the one—the contrary one, unwilling to go along to get along, a loner, the smart kid who keeps asking the teacher questions when everybody else is ready for lunch, the guy doggedly talking about lighting and nighttime glare long after the Mayor and the other Commissioners are glaring at him and ready to turn off the lights and depart for home.

It’s a role Carl is used to, one he inherited from John Barrow, who used to be the one against the nine before he got elected to Congress and had to turn himself into a Republican facsimile in order to survive the gerrymander that threw him into the south Georgia swamps.

The funny thing is that through the hard work and persistence of candidates and voters and R.E.M., we have over the years elected a relatively liberal Mayor and Commission, a group in which you would think Carl Jordan would be leading the majority to unanimous votes in an era of overall good feeling. Instead, there he is for all to see behind the rail and on TV: a minority of one.

Then there’s Idaho. Carl has a vacation home in Idaho. Retired, widowed, with his sons grown, Carl spends time in Idaho. When he’s down, he talks about getting off the Commission, selling his home in Kingswood and moving west. Carl’s detractors would be glad to help him move, and many willing hands would make the job a snap.

You’d think the Commission and the community, not to mention late-night television watchers, would be better off shed of such a cantankerous curmudgeon, whose absence should smooth the path of local government.

Maybe so; maybe not. Unless Carl decides on his own to pull up stakes and ride into the sunset, the decision whether he remains on the Commission will be made by the voters in Commission District 6. They are the final arbiters whether they think Carl represents them well enough to keep him around. And their choice will no doubt come down to whether Carl responds to their calls about drainage, potholes, water pressure, traffic calming, leaf-and-limb pickup and dead skunks in the middle of the road: the important issues of local government.

It may be that Carl is a great go-to guy for such problems. It could be that his cantankerousness is a strong suit when it comes to bringing a constituent’s problem to the attention of the proper department of local government. If I had a pothole issue, I’d be glad to have Carl on it. If I were the Director of Pothole Patching, I wouldn’t want Carl on my case. And of course even when he’s in Idaho, he’s still on his phone and his email all day, as he is in Athens.

Carl’s re-election is in the hands of the District 6 voters, but their decision will have a direct impact on the rest of our community. He has strong ideas about how government should protect and extend the quality of life here, and he’s as comfortable debating philosophies of government as he is questioning the manager on support for the police department. He’s not office-bound. If there’s a sewer-line leak or a construction site without adequate runoff protection or an endangered tree canopy, Carl will be right out there in the woods taking a look for himself.

Carl is not just grandstanding behind the rail at City Hall: he hates compromise. He frequently feels that his fellow commissioners don’t want to do the right thing, the tough thing, and even though he knows he’s going down to another nine-one defeat, he is trying to educate his colleagues and the public. Carl believes that if people just understand the facts that they’ll make the right decisions. When he sees people making wrong decisions, he thinks they don’t understand the facts, so he tries all the harder to get his ideas across, even when people are tired of listening.

So, although his re-election is up to the District 6 voters, the whole community has a stake in whether Carl Jordan stays on the Commission. He may quit; he may get beat; but as long as he’s on the Commission, he’s not going to shut up, and that’s good for all of us, whether we like it or not.

Pete McCommons

editor@flagpole.com