Last week, Director of the Augusta Housing and Community Development Hawthorne E. Welcher Jr. held a community meeting to discuss the city’s purchase of the Weed School property in the Sand Hills area in order to be “transparent.”
The meeting had less to do with transparency and more to do with the continued attempts at covering up what has already been exposed.
“I don’t hide,” Welcher said during a brief introduction. “I want to be transparent with the media and other people.”
Such sentiments were not the case until Congressman Rick Allen got involved and demanded an accounting of federal money spent through the Augusta Land Bank Authority.
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Welcher placated the crowd by promising to turn the Weed School into a community center while standing inside a perfectly functional community center just a few yards away from the crumbling asbestos-ridden property that the city purchased for $1 million over its value.
The sad thing is that these slick and sleazy bureaucrats have been telling the residents of Sand Hills and the Laney Walker district that they are moving forward to erase the blight in those neighborhoods for over 40 years.
The amount of money that has been spent in those two five-mile area neighborhoods should have those areas looking like the grounds of Augusta National, but instead those areas still look like a DMZ after all the millions and millions of dollars spent to “eradicate blight.”
Commissioner Sean Frantom said it best when discussing the Land Bank operation, stating that the city didn’t seem to have an effective plan to battle blight.
You think so, commissioner?
Frantom and his colleagues on the commission have long known that corruption is rampant in the “Blight Industrial Complex;” and now that it has been exposed for all to see, the commission needs to take real action beyond hurling a few milquetoast questions and holding town hall meetings.
