Vacation thoughts are crowding my mind. So this will be a quick trip down the middle of the road, which ends, for real, later this week on the Florida Gulf coast.

Safety is not Job 1 for the General Assembly. Not only did our inept solons fail to secure a permanent funding source for Georgia's troubled trauma care network, but they also once again walked away from millions of dollars in federal funds for highway safety improvements. The American College of Surgeons and other experts estimate that 700 people die every year in Georgia as a result of the state's inadequate trauma services — most of them the victims of highway accidents that are too far from a hospital that can attend to their serious injuries.

MIKE KING MY OPINION • E-mail King Recent columns: Co-op members have choice to make  Leaders misuse development tools  Make roads safe so that 'routine' deaths decline  'Maverick' Zell's cave of confusion  Cobb still leery of TADs  Pay close attention to these races  Fresh board provides opportunity to start anew

But the state rejects an estimated $20 million a year in highway safety money that would be available to prevent some of those car crashes because the Legislature refuses to enact a law that requires the use of seat belts in pickup trucks. The Preusser Research Group, which pushes for more stringent driving and auto safety laws, makes the point that trauma injuries from lack of seat belt use in trucks will cost the state $46.2 million in Medicaid dollars over the next decade. That's money that could have been diverted instead to help support Georgia's trauma network.

Is racism behind the effort to create a new city of Dunwoody? That was the question posed to the Democratic candidates for chief executive officer of DeKalb County at a recent forum. The answer from all the candidates: probably not.

The false assumption that infects too many opponents of city incorporation in both Fulton and DeKalb counties is that the motivation for cityhood is based mostly on race. A shallow analysis concludes that it happens because voters in the proposed cities are mostly white and the majority of elected county government officials are black.

A more balanced appraisal of these incorporation efforts is that they come about because voters believe the citylike services that county government was trying to provide were simply inadequate — not enough cops on the street, too few firefighters in too few fire stations, planning and zoning requirements unresponsive to neighborhood and commercial realities, etc. The Dunwoody vote may be closer than the recent votes to form Sandy Springs, Milton and other Fulton County cities, but it is likely to pass. The more appropriate question for the DeKalb CEO candidates is this: How will incorporation change what the county is doing?

Saving Carroll County animals. A petition demanding that the Carroll County Commission clean up the county animal shelter and start spending money on basic immunization and health services for the animals it impounds now has nearly 2,000 signatures, the county humane society reports. You can find it at www.thepetitionsight.com/1/save-carroll-county-animals. Tina Buechner, president of the county humane society, said this week that Carroll County officials are only now coming to understand how poorly animals were being treated at the facility.

I wrote about the county shelter — one of the worst in Georgia — in this space last week, relating the sad story of a puppy we adopted from there named Grady, who died six weeks later from pneumonia. A distemper outbreak at the same shelter last month resulted in every animal in it having to be destroyed. Buechner says the county has already agreed to spend more for food, cleaning supplies and medical services, but it will be at least a year before a new shelter is ready because it is being built with prison inmate labor.

To all of you who sent kind notes and messages about Grady, you need to know the King household never goes long without a dog. Two weeks after Grady's death, we adopted a puppy with the same gentle disposition from the Georgia Humane Society, which had rescued him from the Henry County animal shelter. We named him Harper.

Not long after that, we got another young dog from the Adopt a Golden Atlanta rescue group. Her name is Gabby. Together the two of them run our household and are destroying what's left of the flower garden in the back yard. They are both poster pups for animal rescue and adoption agencies.

The beach beckons. See you in a few weeks.

• Mike King is a member of the editorial board. His column appears Thursdays.