Mayor Chuck Shaheen and the Warner Robins City Council are learning a lesson on the problems of a city taking federal tax dollars as they attempt to build the new Law Enforcement Complex. Last August under Mayor Donald Walker, the City Council voted to put the LEC where Jimmy Perkins Field now sits, directly on Watson Boulevard next to City Hall and the Civic Center. The problem that has now arisen is that the city accepted a $30,000 grant in 1980 that requires that Jimmy Perkins Field remain a recreational facility. The city can get around that requirement by getting approval from the United States Department of the Interior to replace Perkins Field with another recreational facility in the city, but the bureaucratic red tape could take anywhere from 30 days and two years to navigate through, with no absolute guarantee that Interior would grant the city’s request.

I have been highly critical of local government taking federal dollars, whether in housing, recreation, or so-called “stimulus.” Mayor Donald Walker was willing to take any money that the federal government was willing to send to Warner Robins, and Mayor Chuck Shaheen during the campaign said he would do the same. It would be foolish for any local politician to say in a campaign that they would reject offers for “free” money from the federal government; after all, it is a way to put more money in the hands of the local government without having to raise taxes on local residents. Such a philosophy is very short-sighted, because it ignores the fact that (some of) those same residents are paying exorbitant federal taxes, but it looks “free” to the politicians and to most local residents.

This short-sighted philosophy reared its ugly head last week as we learned about the situation with Perkins Field. The fact that a small $30,000 grant had the potential to change plans for a much-needed law enforcement center in Warner Robins 30 years after the city received the grant money shows the biggest problem with any local or state government taking money from the federal government: strings. There are always strings attached when the federal government disburses money to other government entities. While it would make more sense not to have the federal government sending that money to state and local governments, the best way for state and local governments to prevent having strings attached to the money they spend is just to avoid taking the federal dollars to begin with.

This brings us to another interesting occurrence last week. The Postal Service, which is required by law to break even on its budget but still lost $3.8 billion last year, is closing underused, unneeded, and money-losing post offices across the country. While it would be better to cut services and to have those services performed by something other than unionized government employees, there is little momentum for that in Washington. So when the Postal Service made the rational business decision to close the Post Office on North Davis Drive, it seemed to be a wise move. Then, just a couple of weeks before the closure, local residents, who could not be bothered to go an extra six miles to get to a Post Office, started protesting, joined by many of the same unionized government Postal Service employees who stood to lose their jobs. Shaheen and City Council sprung into action, appealing to our Congressional delegation to keep the Post Office open. They were successful, and the North Davis Drive Post Office will remain open for at least another year, then we’ll go through the same thing all over again.

This time, Mayor Shaheen and City Council only considered half of the strings attached to the Post Office. This time the strings are votes. The strings they did consider were votes for themselves. The strings they did not consider were the ones for Jim Marshall’s re-election in November. Marshall can use the North Davis Drive Post Office as a piece of pork-barrel spending to buy the votes of residents in north Warner Robins.