Letter to Macon Telegraph
Requesting an article for local county corruption
What we have here is really nothing less than plainly obvious once you wrap your head around it. Local officials in Lamar County are openly performing favors for friends, completely disregarding state and federal law, tampering with county tax records, and targeting local political opponents by encouraging illegal and environmentally destructive construction practices beside their homes, which is costing tax-payers millions of dollars owed to them by law. We have done our best to document everything, and are still in the process of writing it all out and collecting as much evidence as we possibly can. The violations to federal and state law are without question, because photos and even sometimes video evidence was taken while the violations were being performed. Other similar violations are even self admitted by the developers, but because of social ties to county officials, the county officially refused to even acknowledge the violations occurred. Which is outrageous. You have the developer contacting the county, openly acknowledging they have been in violation of the law for over two months, and the county’s response was to refuse to admit that anything took place.
We have been monitoring two developments in the county, one taking place on a sixty acre stretch of land that runs alongside Hwy 36, and the other further back off from the highway on a hundred acre stretch of previous timber land. The former is exemplary of the situation at hand, because of how it came into existence, which was a real estate deal involving the county’s own fire chief. Who openly violated state law by practicing real estate brokering without owning the property himself, and without the required state licensing. The local fire chief financially benefited from the brokered sale by receiving a discount of over $100,000 on a different piece of property he then purchased for himself from the same seller, and was given thousands of dollars in free equipment rental from the buyer, who was temporarily stealing the equipment from his employer. It was an illegal real estate sale that never should have been allowed to occur.
Another reason the smaller of these two developments deserve public attention is because it is a subdivision that is being built on top of the oldest junkyard in the county. The junkyard was previously owned by the McCollum Bros, and had fallen out of operation by the 1950’s at the latest. Old cars, barrels full of oil, various automotive fluids, radiators, lead sensors, and buckets of hardened lead paint were allowed to sit outside and deteriorate for at least 50 years or more, polluting the soil and surrounding land. Since its operation predates all environmentally protective regulations regarding junkyard pollution it is a known toxic waste dump and a ticking time bomb. Without question, the ground is polluted with carcinogens and heavy metals. When the McCollum family sold the land, they removed the junk and had it hauled away, but they did nothing about the pollutants in the soil. The health dept is aware of the situation, but is powerless to prevent it’s construction, and the developers have been informed of the hazards, but don’t care. Just from constructing houses without a building permit and violating the federal soil and erosion prevention act, the subdivision has generated over 3 million dollars in fines. Combine this with the potential violations encountered for constructing homes on property not fit for human occupation and real estate fraud for not informing buyers of known property defects, and you have a disaster waiting to happen.
The county just announced a new tax increase and the largest planned development in its history, which has residents upset. As it appears the current policy of the county is to completely and totally disregard any and all regulatory policies intended to protect the private property of local residents and the environment. The multi million dollar development is planned to take place along several thousand acres of land running parallel to I-75. The land has been primarily used for timber for at least a hundred years or more, and the end result will be an additional 4,000 homes added to the county. Some individuals refer to this as “progress”, but they are mistaken, as progress refers to a forward movement in the direction of an improved state. When federal laws are violated, people are lied to, the personal value of their homes destroyed, and the environment is decimated to solely benefit the wallets of a select minority of individuals, then what you have is the farthest thing from progress.