Several Fayette County residents implored county officials this week to abandon their ongoing fight over the county’s voting system as legal fees exceed $600,000.
“I strongly urge the new commission…(to) take another look at what’s going on with district voting,” Terrence Williams told county commissioners Thursday at their first meeting of the year. “Take a deeper look and spend our money wisely. There’s other things we need to spend our money on.”
Williams lives in District 5, the mostly minority district created last year under a court-ordered district plan.
“Don’t, I beg you, don’t step back,” resident Larry Younginer said. “I subscribe to the theory that change is difficult but change is necessary. Change is going to happen whether you like it or not.”
Thursday’s commission meeting came one day after a federal appeals court in Atlanta sent the Fayette voting rights case back to a lower court for a possible trial. At issue: Fayette officials’ quest to regain at-large voting - an election process, NAACP and other opponents say systematically kept blacks from serving on the commission and school board.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten agreed with that argument and ordered the county to adopt a district voting plan, which enabled voters last November to elect Pota Coston, the county’s first black commissioner. Now Batten must revisit the case.
Commissioner Steve Brown told those in attendance at Thursday’s commission meeting that the lawsuit was “never about Commissioner Coston. I hold her in high esteem. We’re so glad to have her.”
Nonetheless, Rep. Virgil Fludd called the three-and-a-half year legal fight “a bone of contention.”
“It’s been quite divisive,” said Fludd, a Tyrone resident. “It would make sense for us to pause where we are right now. The results of the November election point to the fact we have a great team of commissioners.”
Coston, who was elected vice-chair at Thursday’s meeting, declined to discuss the voting rights case.
Not everyone at Thursday’s meeting supports ending the fight. Resident Mike Coley said he moved to Fayette three years ago for its “wide open spaces, great schools and low taxes and to get away from public transportation and more government interference.”
“Fayette County is a conservative county,” Coley said, adding the NAACP voting rights lawsuit attempts “to divide citizens along racial lines.” He said the five-district voting system “took four-fifths of my voting rights away.”
The NAACP and the county - which includes the commission and school board - combined have spent more than $1 million fighting the case.
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