Lavonia, GA: Cleaner Water??? Please….Better Spend Your Money On Buying Strip Clubs!!!
The War on Sex/Sluts/Gays/Whatever, Wingnutteria August 2nd, 2008
Don’t worry…I still plan to put the fisk on Maggie Hays, and that will be forthcoming…but I just saw a story that really does piss me off.
This courtesy of Elizabeth Wood at Sex In The Public Square:
Question: Your town has a million dollars in its reserve fund. The plan is to spend it on paying off a bond that financed the town’s water treatment plant. Suddenly, the plan changes. The mayor has learned that a strip club in the area has come up for sale and he wants to buy it and shut it down. He arranges the financing through an anonymous third party because he knows that the club owners would never agree to sell to the town. According to the local newspaper the city manager describes it like this:
“We knew they would never sell it to us, but a third party, who does not want to be identified, offered to buy it for us. Just before noon (Tuesday) we closed on the property, and the keys were turned over to us. They (former Cafe Risque owners) won’t find out until (today) who really bought it.”
The mayor announces this radical change in spending priorities at a standing-room-only meeting at City Hall. Which of the following do you think happened at the meeting:
Answer: If you guessed C you get a gold star.
From the north Georgia paper the Independent Mail we have this description of what happened in Lavonia, a small town off of I-85 in the northeast corner of the state. :
The news resulted in cheers and a standing ovation from the crowd, who then followed the mayor out to the Cafe Risque site. There, all of the signage was removed from the building by a tractor, dragged to the center of the parking lot and burned in a large bonfire as more onlookers clapped and cheered.
It is appalling that a town would spend its money shutting down a sexually-oriented business rather than spending on infrastructure. The town spent just shy of one million dollars. In the original plan, spending that money would have saved over a million dollars in future interest payments on a bond that had been issued to pay for upgrading a water treatment plant. Instead it spent the money to destroy a business that no doubt paid taxes into the towns revenue stream.
It is even more appalling that the townspeople would react in manner of the villagers-with-pitchforks-and-torches ritual of burning the businesses signs. What does it mean when a group of people is so morally outraged by the thought of men paying to look at naked women, or of women dancing naked for money, or of men and women interacting erotically outside of the proverbial marriage bed that they will build themselves up into a frenzy and burn parts of a building?
The backwards priorities of the town of Lavonia are shocking and the pleasure taken by the townspeople is evidence that this is not a matter of a single-mindedly misguided politician. The “protect the children/family values” rhetoric juxtaposed against the irresponsible spending of taxpayer dollars could not be more obvious.
I’m curious. Are there citizens of Lavonia who are as outraged by this as I am? Or do the townspeople in this Independent Mail photo represent all of you? I suspect they don’t. I suspect that there are more reasonable voices in your town. I’d love to hear them.
Oh, but this is soooooo beautiful…..who cares about investing on cleaner water (and in the process, lowering the taxes of the citizens of that town by decreasing the level of debt); oh hell to the noooooooooez, we’ve got to get rid of them damn SLUTS and dem QUEERS and all that nasty UNGODLY SEXSEXSEXSEXSEX!!!!!!111111ONE11!!! I know…let’s buy up that damn place and burn that sucka DOWN!!!!
But what’s that….the owners won’t sell?? Forget ‘ em; we can use third parties to buy their property out from under them!! Or claim “eminent domain” and take what we want anyway!!
Now…I wonder what the rest of the townfolk will say when they realize that the entire reserve fund which would have been used to upgrade their water treatment plant has been pissed away on a crusade against a business which had been generating revenue for the town??
And…what will happen when the original owners of the strip club see what has happened and promptly files their lawsuit against the sale of their club against their will….not to mention the damages done to their facility?? Will the Lavonia witchhunters be willing to pay that out of the reserve fund, too??
Talk about your EF5 tornado hitting the sewage plant moment when that happens…..the recall petitions should already be flying.
BTW…Kochanie over at Figleaf’s Real Adult Sex has a detailed follow-up which includes all the financial background on this “sale”….and ponders this question:
After looking at this information, I have to ask this question. What was so abhorrent about the Cafe Risque, its employees and patrons? Why would the public officials of Lavonia, a town with a very low crime rate and a small tax base, spend the money to file five lawsuits in the span of seven years and then jeopardize their town’s bond rating just to get rid of a strip club?
I believe we can guess the answer, now can we???
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