Recently we Jefferson County Commissioners have been getting a number of questions about some of the projects we are working on. It has become obvious that most people have little or no knowledge about what their local government is doing. This has been an issue forever. It seems that about every time we make a decision that impacts more than a few people, we have folks coming out and saying they didn’t know anything about what we were doing and why didn’t we let them know.
To fix that, I set out to write this “state of the county” report for the residents of Jefferson County. I thought maybe I could explain some of the issues we deal with and a bit of the history of our economic development efforts over many years. It can be difficult to talk about one project at a time, because many of the things we work on are tied together in some way. I hope I can explain our local government in a way that makes sense to folks without boring everyone to death.
How local government works
