This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Tea Party Fails in Two Attempts to Kill Sheriff Neil Warren

Cobb Sheriff Neil Warren was in a serious car accident on I-75 in late August. Thanks to the excellent trauma center at Grady Hospital, his fractured vertebrae were surgically repaired.

If Sheriff Warren had been further south in Georgia when the accident occurred, the outcome might not have been as positive. The Georgia Tea Party had campaigned against funding for the creation of a South Georgia trauma unit and won. South Georgia lost and anyone who needed trauma care lost.

The state legislature put funding up for a vote on a state wide referendum. The Tea Party said that it wasn’t a perfect way to fund the South Georgia trauma unit. They fought against it and the initiative didn’t pass.

Find out what's happening in Acworthwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The Tea Party said that it was for a trauma unit in South Georgia. They also said that finding a way to fund it was necessary. The funding process couldn’t be good. It couldn’t be very good. It had to be perfect and the Tea Party has never seen or acknowledged the perfection in anything, certainly not a tax funded trauma unit in South Georgia.

The Tea Party was also for transportation improvements in the metro area, and a way to fund them. Since the Transportation SPLOST wasn’t perfect, they fought against it too. If the Tea Party had been for the T-SPLOST, the truck that hit Sheriff Warren might not have even been on the road. The occupants of the truck might have taken a bus or MARTA to get to their destination and not collided with Cobb’s sheriff.

Find out what's happening in Acworthwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The sheriff was partially to blame. He has always been against MARTA and voiced his opposition to the T-SPLOST because it because it included mass transit which could be used to bring “those” people into Cobb County. Perhaps one of those people who might have used mass transit was responsible for the fracture of the Sheriff’s vertebrae.

Keeping “those” people out of Cobb County or at least apart from regular folks, like the sheriff, has been a prime motivator of public policy. The city of Marietta just pushed through a bond issue for $68 million that would force a lot of “those’ people living on Franklin Road to leave their homes so that some other folks could move in and some rich developers could get richer. Some Tea party types were against this but lost.

Now that the Tea Party has also lost its fight to stop Cobb tax money from funding the Braves, they are looking like a toothless tiger. When they win, South Georgia doesn’t get a trauma center that it needs and the metro area doesn’t get transportation improvements that it needs. When they lose, like against the Braves or on Franklin Road, they look loud but impotent.

In the future when the Sierra Club, NAACP, SCLC, Common Cause, the Chamber of Commerce and some local Cobb community groups look to join forces, the Tea Party may not get a call about that meeting. Who needs Georgia’s biggest loser?

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

More from Acworth