The recent changes Google made to embedded scripts for Street View is rather annoying. However, it did produce a couple of positive results.
So, remember when I mentioned those newly-available images previously? They let me take a step back and wax nostalgic on some of my older articles. They’re history now but they were current events back then and fun at the time. I wondered as I read through them, “where are they now?” One of those involved the border dispute between Bibb and Monroe Counties in Georgia.
Taking Another Look
I hadn’t thought about the situation in Bibb and Monroe Counties since I posted the original article. January 2009 seems so long ago now. The disagreement was — as I noted at the time — more than academic. The winner would get about $1.3 million in annual tax revenue from a giant Bass Pro Shop. Plus, another 400 parcels of land would come with it.
That’s 125,000 square feet of retail space and up to a thousand jobs!
More Like a Soap Opera
I thought they would have resolved the issue by now but I was wrong. The Governor appointed a surveyor and the two sides were going to work it out. However, fireworks erupted when the Governor’s designated surveyor filed his report. He concluded that the northeast corner was off by about 800 feet where it met the Ocmulgee River.
Bibb County would have found itself on the losing end of that proposition. They’d already invested heavily in infrastructure improvements for the Bass Fish Pro facility. So, no surprise, it expressed great displeasure with the results. The survey proposed to cut through that property and lop-off a swath of Bibb County.
Naturally, Bibb County filed a protest. It argued that the old boundary should stand because it’s been a commonly-understood marker for more than a century. Moving the border would also create the inconvenience of a small exclave of Bibb County located within Monroe County, a single property appended onto Bibb by state law in the late 19th Century.
Now, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I most assuredly don’t pretend to know all the facts either. However, there seems to be a bit of “blame the messenger” going on here. Bibb County hasn’t paid the surveyor for its half of the survey fee. The county also called for a legal deposition. So the surveyor responded in a decidedly 21st Century fashion with a pretty slick website called Bibb Monroe Battle [link no longer works] that explains the situation from his perspective.
Things move slowly when it involves territorial possession. I’ll let you know if the two parties ever agree on anything.
Leave a Reply