Archibald: Jeffco silver lining has a dark cloud

The Birmingham News
By John Archibald
October 14, 2009

Under all the chaos and corruption, beneath all that county debt and at the end of those long, long courthouse lines, was a shining seed of hope.

It was the idea that great challenge leads to great ideas and great change. It was the prospect that through crisis, the indomitable human spirit tends to find a better way.

That was the seed. And county leaders crushed it beneath the steel-toed boots of their buffoonery.

Ain't no phoenix rising from these ashes, folks. We'll be lucky, when the flames burn low, to find a Phenix City.

Yes, the county's occupational tax detour is finally winding down. Furloughed employees are back to work and the satellite courthouses are reopening. By the time the tax comes up for a vote in three years, we won't even remember the woe.

We have gotten back to business as usual.

Which is the worst thing that could happen.

For business as usual is an illusion, and business as usual was achieved without foresight or apparent thought. Business as usual came at the expense of good policy, reason, or consideration for real cost.

What rises from our ashes? Just more smoke.

The county commission, in its haste to put things back as they always were, recklessly cut funding to programs that not only work well in this community, but keep it safer and better informed. And save us money to boot.

The most inexplicable cut came to TASC, or Treatment Alternatives for Safer Communities, which is to the court system what 10W-40 is to your car's engine.

It cuts the sludge, reduces jail overcrowding and -- according to a federal study -- keeps 30 percent of criminals from committing more crimes while out on bail.

TASC for decades has worked with courts and criminal offenders, performing drug tests after arrests, monitoring offenders and giving judges what they need to figure out what to do with criminals.

It saves millions in law enforcement and court costs, not to mention the cost -- financial, emotional and otherwise -- to victims. So Jeffco whacked it like a weed.

With $1.5 million cut from its budget, TASC is at a loss. It will likely have to do away with Domestic Violence Court, end drug tests and monitoring, and stop serving as many as 6,000 people jailed each year.

So more will re-offend. Criminals will be stacked like cordwood in the already-overcrowded jail. And crime will rise.

Just so we can get back to business. Or business as usual.

It's not so tangible, but cuts to the Jefferson County Library Cooperative -- which works pretty seamlessly to bring books, data and knowledge to the masses -- are almost as ill-conceived. The cooperative is one of few programs that actually bridges our boundaries.

I guess readers, here in the ashes, are easy targets.

And our seed of hope is dying in the dirt.

Faced with a chance to right our wrongs and to think in new and creative ways, we chose the opposite path. Just so we could do things the way we always did them.

The way, you know, that brought us to chaos in the first place.