Posted on 10/30/2007 12:51:15 PM PDT by SmithL
NEW ORLEANSDistrict Attorney Eddie Jordan disclosed plans to resign Tuesday amid a $3.7 million discrimination verdict against his office and a rising murder rate since Hurricane Katrina.
Jordan's spokesman, Dalton Savwoir, said the district attorney told his staff he would resign on Wednesday.
Jordan lost the discrimination lawsuit against dozens of his former employees in 2005. The white former employees said they were fired by Jordan, who is black, because of their race.
Jordan has consistently lost the appeals in that case and earlier this week, a federal judge refused to delay payment of the judgment. That opened the door to possible seizure of district attorney's office assets to meet the debt, and led to renewed calls for Jordan's ouster.
Mayor Ray Nagin on Tuesday reiterated that the city would not pay the judgment, saying it could not afford it and that it would set a bad precedent.
Jordan also has been among city officials criticized for the city's growing violent crime problem. New Orleans has had 178 murders so far this year, compared to 162 in all of last year, and a backlog of criminal cases moving slowly through the courts.
(Excerpt) Read more at contracostatimes.com ...
But our current county is very efficient in its use of money, and it has the highest bond rating of any county in the state. That's one of the reasons we moved here (they also have much lower property taxes and the police and fire service are exemplary.)
Just about the only county functions are sheriff and register of deeds. The sheriff runs the county jails and his biggest responsibility is running a taxi and boarding service for prisoners awaiting trial. Sheriff doesn’t do any significant law enforcement.
Sheriff’s office and registry of deeds are the proverbial hackaramas.
Middlesex County took on the responsibility of running two hospitals which were vital to providing jobs for the relatives and (invariably girl-)friends of county officials who couldn’t be hidden in the sheriff’s office or registry.
Atlanta/Fulton will never do that because too many patronage jobs would be lost. Basically the same problem you've got in Mass, with the govt being run by the pols, of the pols, and for the pols and their girlfriends and relatives. To be absolutely fair, Fulton as currently constituted is made up of THREE counties - the original Fulton in the middle, and Milton and Campbell stuck on the ends after they went bankrupt during the Depression. It looks like a long skinny Gerrymander but really isn't. The outlying areas have always complained about getting short shrift, and recently the folks in the former Milton County took matters into their own hands by incorporating the entire former Milton area outside the long-standing cities of Roswell and Alpharetta into three municipalities - Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, and Milton. Don't know if it's going to help as much as they hope. There is still a movement afoot for the former Milton County to secede from Fulton, but there are constitutional barriers to that.
But in the rest of GA there is a whole lot of rural real estate. Our county, Cobb, is one of the central metro counties, but there is only one good-sized city (Marietta, the county seat) and a number of smaller incorporated municipalities (it seems silly to call them cities when you can walk across them in ten minutes). Most of the county's area is what we refer to as "Unincorporated Cobb". That's of course even more true when you get out into the truly rural counties. My parents live in a rural coastal county, and the only incorporated town in the whole county is the county seat - population 1500.
Massachusetts is a whole different story because it's so much smaller and the overall population density is so much greater. GA is the largest state east of the Mississippi, and it has 159 counties (probably too many from a practical standpoint, but an artifact of the days when a farmer had to be able to drive his wagon to the county seat in a reasonable time.)
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