Making-Do

(The following article was written about my grandfather Vincent Hix by Beth Bassett and appeared in Atlanta Weekly on March 28, 1982.)

Making-Do in Madison County

By Beth Bassett

Where the prodigious budget-balancing efforts of David Stockman fell short in 1981, those of a Danielsville, Georgia, man seem to have succeeded. Vincent J. Hix holds a job not unlike that of the head of OMB, and while the budget he presides over as chairman of the Board of County Commissioners of Madison County is less awesome than Stockman's, the problems are similar. 

There are just over 17,500 homefolks in largely rural Madison County, located in northeast Georgia. They are a proud bunch, proud of the oak-shaded courthouse built in 1901 and now listed on the National Register of Historic Places; proud of their most famous son, Crawford W. Long, the first physician in the United States to sedate a patient with ether prior to a surgical procedure; proud of their own self-sufficiency. Theirs is not a rich county, but they've always been able to make-do with what they have.

That ability to make-do has been severely tested by the 1981 county budget. The budget came into being in the following way. After a long and bitterly fought campaign, Hix defeated the incumbent commission chairman in the local election held in August of 1980. In the month of October 1980, the incumbent, perhaps in a fit of pique, decided to lower the millage rate levied on property owners from its all-time high in 1980 of 10.57 mills to 7.56 mills, with the new rate to go into effect under his successor. Because there are not many large properties in the county—no shopping centers or big factories—the tax revenues had never been much in excess of what was needed to run the government. Yet, despite rising inflation, there would be less money with which to operate in 1981 than there had been in 1980. In December 1980, the incumbent drew up a new budget that, in keeping with the decreased revenues, cut by nearly $135,000 the funds available for county department expenditures.

On January 1, 1981, Hix pulled up stakes in the County Tax Office where he had served as tax commissioner for 13 1/2 years, and, along with his new bookkeeper, Carolyn Bagwell, moved down the courthouse hall to the office set aside for the chairman of the board of commissioners. The previous occupant of that office was not there to greet the new administration, but he had left two things on Bagwell's desk: a set of 50 unidentified keys and the budget. Bagwell was able to identify the keys by trial and error. She was given no list of county employees to whom she had to issue paychecks, but when the time came, she paid the ones she knew about and figured the rest would come and ask. They did.

The budget problem was much more difficult to solve. After studying the figures, Hix and Bagwell caculated that the county would go broke by the first of May. They fussed and fiddled with the numbers. "Right off," Hix said, "we decided to put some of the money we didn't immediately need into short-term money market certificates. That would stretch it a little.

"Most of the expenses of the county were absolute. Salaries had to be paid—the clerk of the court, the judges, the tax assessor, the police, the jailors and others had to be compensated. We had to feed the prisoners in the jail. We had to work the county roads and bridges."

Hix and Bagwell thought they could meet the fixed expenses, but from there on they'd have to wing it. They began to sift through the additional expenditures. They found that the county was spending several hundred dollars a year buying ice for the use of the judges, jurors and road crews. That could be cut, they thought. At a state surplus store, Hix found a ramshackle but working icemaker marked $100. He bought the machine, set it up in the county barn, and arranged for ice to be taken from the barn to the courthouse in Styrofoam coolers when court was in session. The cost of the machine, prorated over a year's time, came to a little over $9 a month. 

The surplus stores are gold mines in other ways, too, he discovered. He located desks there priced at $25 each, file cabinets that cost $20, and file folders, stenographic pads and paper clips that, when compared with new office supplies, were greatly reduced in price. At an Army surplus store he located a big, red, diesel welding machine inscribed USMC and marked $150. New, this machine would cost about $8,000. In the past the county had hired subcontractors to repair bridges because their own crews had no welding equipment. These subcontractors often charged more than $150 for a single job. With this machine the county crews could repair the bridges themselves. He bought  the welder. He also bought a surplus steam cleaner for use on the motors of county equipment. Thoroughly cleaned motors, he reasoned, would incur fewer repair bills.

One of the things Hix had meant to do when he took over his new job was fix that infernal cracked pipe in his old office. It was an exposed, four-inch pipe that ran from the toilet on the floor above, down the corner of the tax commissioner's office, and into the ladies' toilet on the floor below. The thing was, that every week for 13, nearly 14, years, he had sat there plagued by the foul odor. He hired a plumber to replace the pipe, but he couldn't find a carpenter to board it in, so he did it himself. Glad the job was finally done, the clerks in teh tax office hauled off the scraps of lumber he left and swept up the sawdust.

Gradually, as they noted Hix's prodigious efforts to keep the government solvent and the buildings in respectable condition, people in the county began to offer their cooperation. The hardware man across the street from the courthouse and several other Danielsville residents donated and planted new azaleas around the square to help perk up the place a little, and people showed a good spirit toward the business of paving the roads. "We needed to pave a lot of roads," Hix said. "We have a dust problem here. We don't have a lot of complaints about mud. We can fix mud holes by patching them with gravel, but we don't have that kind of answer for dust. So people were coming before the commissioners saying, 'How about paving our road?' In the past the county had furnished the extra soil that has to be put down before the roads can be paved, and cleared the sides of the roads so ditches could be dug. We said, 'We'll pave the roads if you clean the right-of-way and furnish the soil.' So far, people have been glad to do that. That saves us a lot of money.

"The county had always built driveways for new homes. We still do that, but we've asked the people to clear out the paths themselves so we don't have to bring in bulldozers to push down trees. We also asked that if they need culvert pipes to go under the driveways, they furnish those. They've been cooperative in doing both of those things."

By far the most difficult problem Hix had to tackle was the matter of the police cars. There were two of them, both 1972 Ford LTDs. One car had 250,000 miles on its odometer, the other 300,000. Like tired old soldiers, they kept going, but just barely. The exhaust system of one of the cars was rusted out all the way to the motor. The doors on the cars wouldn't close right. The interior carpets and seats were ragged. The gears ground something terrible.

The 1981 budget allocated $6,200 for one new car. "In reality, one new car cost $8,400, and we needed two," Hix said. "It was clear we couldn't buy them new, but the situation was crucial. After I was elected, a fellow that lives in the county came to my office and said that a few days before he'd called the sheriff's department and asked for someone to go with him to help settle a dispute. A long while later a deputy came rattling up, he said, in one of the old cars. The fellow got in with the deputy. As they rode, he tried to fill the deputy in on the problem he was having, but they couldn't hear each other talk for the noise of the exhaust and the general clatter. He said, 'Let's pull over by the side of the road and cut this thing so I can tell you what the matter is.' The deputy cut it off and they talked and then went on. They got to the third man's house and settled the dispute and got back in the car. The deputy turned the key, but the car wouldn't start. It had overheated. They had to sit there and let it cool before it would even crank. This fellow said to 'em, 'You've got to do something. This must be the only sheriff's department in the United States that has to hitchhike from one call to another.'

"We went to the state surplus and bought cars that had been turned by the State Patrol. We bought two 1978 Ford LTDs for $700 each. They're real good-looking cars. They had the State Patrol insignias on them so we had to paint them, but that cost us only $300 for each one. Then, since we had money left over for cars, we went back and bought two more 1978 Fords for the same price, one for the Civil Defense department and one for the commissioner's office. One of those was a GBI car. It was meant to let the agents travel anonymously, I guess, because it was just a plain brown color, and didn't have any insignia on it. We didn't have to paint it."

Although he saved a lot of money on the car coup. Hix, wanting to squeeze out a few more pennies, put the two old LTD patrol cars up for bids. Unfortunately, but perhaps understandably, there were no takers. Did he consign the spent warriors to the town dump? He did not. Hix, the pragmatist, parked them side by side on a bare, windswept knoll out in front of the county road barn. There, the front bumpers an dusty windshields face, perhaps symbolically, the rising sun. And now and then, in the cool of a morning, Hix sends somebody out into the thriving, knee-deep sagebrush that covers the cars' final resting place to scavenge for spare parts, a hubcap, maybe, or a headlight.

As for the nearly new cars—the patrol cars and the Civil Defense car painted shiny-white an bearing big blue bubbles on the roofs, and the long brown car marked "County Commissioner"—they are the pride of the county, representing as they do, the ultimate blow to a bad budget.

Does Hix have any advice for Stockman and Reagan? Indeed he does. He counsels them to persevere in their efforts to balance the national budget. "I agree with Reagan when he said, 'If not us, who; if not now, when?' You can't borrow yourself out of trouble. The county governments can't do it and the federal government can't." 

As of the end of 1981, the Madison County government was solvent and, barring disaster, was expected to remain so. And Hix and Bagwell have borrowed not a penny.