CARLTON FLETCHER: Times gets hard on the lower tier

What about us?

— Pink

I love Georgia above all other places. The beaches along Florida’s Gulf Coast are amazing to visit, but eventually you get enough sand in your crack and a few jellyfish stings or a painful sunburn, and you feel that old inevitable pull to be, as Charlie Daniels sang, “about 90 miles north of Jacksonville.”

(I’ll confess before I continue: I’m not a well-traveled person. I’ve been out west as far as Texas, up north to Rome, N.Y., but those were one-off trips. I’d probably love visiting Paris, Ireland, Venice, Japan, London, the Caribbean Islands. But Georgia is comfortable. It feels like home.)

I profess my love for my home state for a reason. I’m very happy, proud even, that Georgia has been voted the best state in the union to do business with five years running. And I’m elated that the Peach State’s bottom line has moved into the black by not millions, but billions of dollars in recent years.

But as I watch our elected officials, our lords of commerce and our economic developers pat each other on the back at one Atlanta self-congratulatory news conference after another, two questions come to mind: Are we, down here in the apparent external orifice of the state, not part of Georgia? And if we are, where’s ours?

We understand down this way that life’s not made up of unicorns that poop gold. We get that nothing comes without a price and without sacrifice. And even those of us who have a deep-seated hatred for elitist cities like Atlanta (not me, by the way) have to admit that our capital city worked hard to become the place where businesses want to come and do their business.

But in their never-ending quest to make Atlanta even more of a wonderland, our officials who are tasked with making the entire state solvent have forgotten this little quadrant even exists. Oh, they’ll come to Albany to show their faces around election time or visit a small city like Tifton when they want to project an image as champions of the “little people.”

But southwest Georgia is gradually — steadily — sinking under the weight of its inadequacies, some self-inflicted, others at least partially due to the neglect of the controllers of the state’s purse strings, who have little inclination to “waste” money when there’s so much to do in the ever-expanding megalopolis where most either live or congregate.

So what if every single child in a Stewart, Quitman, Randolph, Terrell, Dougherty, Clay or Calhoun county public school lives in substandard housing and with a family whose income is well below the poverty line? We just brought three new businesses and 1,500 jobs to the ATL.

And maybe the ancient infrastructure is crumbling down in the well-past-their-prime communities south and east of Columbus and south and west of I-75, communities that have endured two 500-year floods and killer storms that left a billion-dollar damage tab in their wake. But we’ve just started a new multibillion-dollar repaving cycle around the perimeter.

Yeah, we know, we know … “You people made your bed so lie in it.” And, yeah, we’re aware that we’ve been duped by more than our share of Professor Henry Hills who’ve come this way with plans for rebirth only to drive away with piles of our hard-earned money we entrusted to officials whose financial acumen had to be learned at the feet of drunken sailors.

We know you movers and shakers under the gold Dome have to keep handing out goodies — incentives, grants, abatements — to the fatcats up your way to keep them happy. But must we be the sacrificial lambs who suffer to keep their shirts stuffed?

We understand that your bean counters have assured you that there aren’t enough votes down this way to matter, but I ask you to forget about the metrics for once and think about the people. We have so many people living in poverty, it’s become a way of life, the only life they’ve ever known. And we have an aging tax base who’s tired of seeing their tax dollars frittered away by incompetent local officials and uncaring state leaders.

Some have said there are two Georgias. I disagree. There is a three- or four-tiered system in play here that determines who in the state gets what from the powers that be. And let me just say for the record, it sucks being the ones on the bottom tier.

Contact Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ABH_Fletcher.