In a curious bit of legislative strategy, the House Governmental Affairs Committee last week combined a couple of bills that didn’t seem to have a whole lot to do with each other. House Bill 1253, as originally written, would have overhauled the way appointments are made to the boards of directors of the state’s 12 Regional Commissions. House Bill 999 would have allowed three or more economically distressed counties to combine operations and access certain non-specific pots of state and federal money.

Individually, each bill faced natural predators in the legislative wild that is the Georgia General Assembly. Combined, the resulting bill’s fate could be like crossing Snoopy with Bambi and dropping their cuddly offspring into a pack of political hyenas.

Which is not to say either proposal is totally without merit. The Regional Commissions, for example, have long been the subject of political and bureaucratic grousing. One problem, I’m reliably informed, is getting board members to show up for meetings. The solution, as proposed in House Bill 1253, would be to fire all the sitting board members effective December 31, 2024, and have a new slate ready to take office January 1, 2025.

The new boards would include most of the members of the old boards plus, as nearly as I can figure, several dozen new citizen members who would have to be rounded up and convinced to serve by Governor Brian Kemp. According to the bill, Kemp would be expected to make his picks based on “the regional commitments of such candidates, their past contributions to the government and economy of the region, their commitment to the council, their leadership abilities, and their knowledge of state and local government as well as demographic diversity of the region.”

Left unclear was whether the governor might also consider their contributions to his political campaigns — or, for that matter, whether having made such a contribution would make them more or less likely to be appointed to a Regional Commission board.

Of greater consequence, probably, than the proposed musical chairs at Regional Commission board meetings is the other part of the now-combined HB 1253 — a provision allowing the creation of “special rural districts.” These special districts would be made up of three or more adjoining counties, all of which had been losing population and revenues for at least the three previous years. These counties would also have to “(enter) into an agreement with all other counties in such special rural district to consolidate all services within such district and to use a joint administrator for the administration or support of the administration of all such services.”

If the casual observer’s first impression is that this proposal smacks a bit of county consolidation, the second impression is the more pertinent: the bill would actually create a whole new layer of government (the aforementioned joint administrator, who would no doubt have to have his or her own organization and staff) without getting rid of a single high sheriff or wiping out a single county line. In a clumsy stab at the carrot end of a carrot-and-stick approach, the bill hints that any new special rural districts would be “eligible” for historic preservation funds and “other such funds as may become available.”

Exactly where the “other such funds” might become “available” from was unclear, but the one sure bet is that they wouldn’t come from within the special rural districts themselves. They’re already pretty much dead broke. Most likely, in one way or another, Metro Atlanta taxpayers would be made to cough up the tax dollars needed to keep failing rural communities afloat.

County consolidation has long been a third rail in Georgia politics. The last politician to propose trimming the number of Georgia counties — from the current 159 to fewer than 90 — was an Atlanta Republican named Kiliaen Townsend. This was in the 1980s, and Townsend, who represented a wealthy Buckhead House district, considered it obvious that Georgia had more counties than it needed, including a fair number that couldn’t support themselves.

“They have no reason to exist,” Townsend told an interviewer from the Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library in 2006. “They have two or three thousand people, no business, no jobs, no health, no education, no law enforcement, really…” Georgia ranked close to the bottom nationally in education, he added, “because who’s going to teach in Podunk County with a bunch of illiterate parents (who are) uninterested in education?”

It bears mentioning that Townsend had migrated to Georgia from points north and lacked, shall we say, a natural appreciation for the nuances of rural Georgia and its politics. He was, however, a stubborn sort and insisted on taking his case for county consolidation directly into the counties his legislation would obliterate. The state’s Democratic governor at the time, Joe Frank Harris, apparently did not want a dead Republican on his hands and had the foresight to send a couple of state troopers with Townsend on his forays south of the gnat line.

Townsend passed away in 2008 (of natural causes, I should probably note) and I haven’t been able to turn up a recording or an account of any of his rural Georgia presentations. But he was presumably a little more diplomatic in those than he was with the Russell Library interviewer. Even so, the services of the state troopers apparently came in handy on a number of occasions. By multiple accounts, Townsend had to be hustled out of several meetings by the troopers and rushed through the night to the next day’s stop.

It’s worth noting as well that Townsend was not one to shy away from controversial public policies. Among other provocative policies, he advocated for abortion rights and the legalization of prostitution. Odds are he could have gotten more General Assembly votes for either of those proposals than for county consolidation.

In the four decades since Townsend’s quixotic efforts, much of rural Georgia has descended into Third World status. Educational attainment levels from Macon to the Florida line are literally the worst in the nation. Most of those counties are mired in the bottom national quartile for every key economic metric, including per capita income, median household income and poverty. I’ve lost track of the number of rural hospitals that have closed. I’ll have more on this in later posts, but local governments are running out of money and their infrastructures are crumbling.

Townsend was, of course, right 40 years ago, and he’d still be right today. But it may no longer matter. Back then, county consolidation might have made a difference. Now, it may be too late for much of rural Georgia — and odds are rural Georgia still wouldn’t go along with it.