COVID relief funds request right thing to do
Anderson County Operations Committee voted Monday night to forward a resolution to the full Anderson County Commission to send to state and federal lawmakers asking that COVID-19 relief measures include provisions for rural volunteer fire departments.
“It’s time to take this domestic money and get it to our rural communities,” Operations Committee Chairman Tim Isbel said during the meeting.
“Anderson County is a beacon; this is a grass roots movement,” he said.
As far as anyone can tell, this may be the first time a county has requested a state or federal government to look at the finer print. The finer print being rural communities that take up so much of our great country’s landscape.
Maybe there is an “operations committee” in Kansas, or Wyoming, or some other county in some other state that you could see in your mind’s eye as being “rural,” contemplating this same sort of resolution for their communities.
Who knows?
But I wouldn’t expect anything less from a county that nurtured the Atomic Age and ended World War II; is the site of TVA’s first hydro-electric dam that ushered in the age of electricity for all in the 1930s; and home to the first desegregated Southern high schools — twice — one by federal mandate and one by decree of a publicly-elected school board.
On the latter of those three: Does it matter how it happened? It’s important that it did happen.
In those instances, Anderson County was the beacon.
And Anderson County is that beacon again.
Anderson County is home to a county government that sees the importance of supporting a rural infrastructure that is vital to its citizens’ needs.
The state and feds may control the COVID-19 relief funds and the red tape it takes to get them, but maybe Anderson County government can take a stand and make some people re-think things and understand what’s needed.
And where.