There are a few things most people don’t know about County Commissioner Bill James. Take a good look at the group photo of the commissioners on the county website sometime. Note the yellow cast of his skin.
There’s a reason James has become increasingly shrill on the issues he cares most about — namely anything having to do with gays, blacks and morality. I won’t bore you with the details, but he’s been battling a terminal liver disease for the past few years, and the odds that he’ll be around a decade from now, or if he is, that he’ll be able to speak coherently about anything, aren’t too good. He’s obsessive about collecting cartoons and anecdotes about himself, good, bad or otherwise, for his future grandkids. It’s probably the only way they’ll ever know him, because James is slowly wasting away.
So James stays home with the kids, buries his nose in county business and spends his time on the phone gossiping about local politics. He has the best list of anonymous sources in town — and they are of every color, religion and political persuasion.
Some of James’ closest cronies are black. James was largely responsible for the devastating political rift that still divides the local black political caucus. Why? Because he got the evidence of the group’s illegal accounting practices, which he ultimately turned over to the state board of elections, directly from his sources inside the caucus. Suspicion and paranoia over who committed that treasonous act has torn the group apart.
As you’ve learned from reading Creative Loafing in recent weeks, many elected officials in town don’t fully understand what they’re voting for half the time because they don’t bother to read all of the voluminous background information the bureaucrats send them. Not James. There isn’t an elected official in this county who is more willing or able to dig through the financial minutiae local government would rather taxpayers not know about.
Though you may not be able to tell it from watching their coverage last week, the media can’t get enough of him. Yes, you read that right. It’s a lot easier to meet your deadline if Bill’s got a story waiting for you and has already done half the work. No one else will cop to this publicly of course, but it’s true. It’s not unusual for me to get on the phone with Bill after one of the holier-than-thous at the Observer has just gotten off. The list of the stories he’s fed the reporters at that paper, good stories, is a long one. Like the goodies package the county commissioners approved last December, when they spent more than $3.7 million to buy land from the Episcopal Diocese for the Little Sugar Creek Greenway, including unnecessary payments to the dioceses’ tenants, including Bank of America and Exxon. Commissioners conveniently left that discussion out of the minutes of the closed-door meeting where they cut the deal. James defied the rest of the commission and leaked the story to the Observer.
I know because I went three rounds with him after the story initially ran for having leaking it to them instead of us.
Of course, there’s a price you have to pay for a story from James, and believe me, we all pay it. It’s impossible to get off the phone with him in under 45 minutes because if you want to know what’s going on, you’ve first got to endure his latest rant about the gays and the blacks. James didn’t like the column I wrote years ago about the struggles of a family member of mine who is a single mother because her child was born out of wedlock. He still brings it up, and I grit my teeth like everyone else.
So when I read his “moral sewer” comments in the Observer last week, I was frankly perplexed. For James, that’s nothing. And everyone in the media worth their salt knows it. Any of us could have written that story anytime in recent years but, except for a swipe at James’ racial attitudes by CL‘s editor a few weeks ago, none of us did — until now. Why?
I think the sudden fascination with James’ comments has more to do with the severe blow Judge Howard Manning dealt the county last week by comparing our pathetic test scores and the gross amount of money we spent to achieve them with higher scores in other counties that spend less — a story as embarrassing to the Observer as it is to the politicians they’ve been endorsing for years who are directly responsible for it.
Had the story about James’ well-known racism not run above the fold in the Observer, the big story rightfully would have been the incompetence of the folks running our school system, a story the Observer has been avoiding like the plague for some time now.
Talk about Bill the bigot all you want, guys, but longer lasting stories like those test scores, and the truth, won’t go away.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Dec 8-14, 2004.
