Call it democracy in action, or call it mob rule.

If you called it mob rule, you were in the minority Tuesday morning.

With lowering skies as a backdrop for an issues-fueled rally on the steps of the Cullman County Courthouse, more than 200 people came for the venom — then stuck around to administer the antidote.

To an animated crowd, many of whom wielded signs proclaiming “Take back our water,” event organizer Jackie Satterfield delivered a 15-minute sermon that scourged the two outgoing associate county commissioners for their anticipated effort to pass — in their last meeting before leaving office — a series of controversial measures that would’ve committed county funds to bolster the two water utility boards they created in April.

“If I give the county a hundred dollars, or two hundred dollars for this water system that’ll be a hell of a lot more than they got when they gave it away for free,” Satterfield yelled before a throng of shouting demonstrators. “Two gave this water system away. And let me tell you something — when we gather today, we’re not gathering as Republicans or as Democrats...we’re gathering to take back our water from these turkeys who gave it away. They...met in secret to draw this thing up. But the public’s business should be conducted in public.”

Satterfield was followed by an equally-animated state Senate Majority Leader. Zeb Little picked up the speech where Satterfield left off, and proceeded to eviscerate the character of the two associate commissioners for continuing to defend the Governmental Utility Services Corporation of Cullman County (GUSC) and the South Cumberland Cooperative District (SCCD) they created earlier this year.

“I want to know — who is mad as hell at what’s going on?” Little asked the enthused crowd. “What do you want?” he shouted.

Without hesitation, the group responded:

“Our water back!”

“I want to thank the four candidates for county commissioner — two Republicans and two Democrats — who have stood together to fight corruption in Cullman County,” Little continued. “There’s a team of Birmingham lawyers that these guys are trying to pay with our money. My tax money — your money — is being used to fund this scheme. We as taxpayers don’t have control of our assets anymore. Jackie [Satterfield] says they [Williams and Willingham] gave it away. The truth is, they stole it.”

The ugly skies held their water for the duration of the 30-minute event, leaving the crowd free to stroll back to their cars when the rally ended.

Instead, nearly every person in attendance strolled around the backside of the courthouse to pass through the metal detector framing the building’s lone public entrance. As many as could fit packed a first-floor commission meeting room that had 54 seats. About that many more crowded the walls at the room’s periphery. And about twice that number crammed the hallway just outside the room — for the duration of the hour-long meeting.

They were there for the meeting’s public comments portion. The list of speakers who wished to have their turn at associate commissioners Doug Williams and Wayne Willingham required a sort of impromptu cattle-call queueing effort from commission chairman James Graves, who summoned would-be speakers waiting out in the hallway well in advance of their turn at the mic, just so they could pardon their way through the crowd in timely enough a fashion to ensure the meeting didn’t run long.

And it didn’t.

After a dozen speakers followed one another with applause-inducing comments like Henry Whaley’s “After the meeting today, everybody in Cullman County and beyond is gonna know just how smart you are,” and John Miller’s “The people of Cullman County, and the people of Alabama, and the people of the United States are sick and tired of elected officials who believe they know better than we know what we want — you think we’re stupid, but we’re not,” the meeting’s business portion began.

To everyone’s surprise, some of the water utility measures everyone expected to be on the agenda weren’t there.

What controversial material did make it onto the agenda consisted of two things: the passage — this time during a full session attended by all three commissioners — of the 2011 fiscal year budget; and consideration of obligating the county to front the money for a $500,000 defendants’ surety bond so that the water utilities and their two respective boards may continue to wage an appeal of a circuit court injunction against them before the Supreme Court of Alabama.

The budget passed — with a caveat. The bond didn’t even come up for a vote.

The budget caveat was elicited from Willingham by chairman Graves, who used the commission podium — in the presence of so many people — as a kind of witness stand on which to question Willingham’s intentions of obligating an alleged $300,000 of FY 2011 funds for what he described as essentially a lame-duck road project on the county’s west side.

Graves accused Willingham of intending to pave County Road 1101 with asphalt — an expensive material normally reserved for very few paving projects each year — instead of the less-costly, more commonly-used mixture of asphalt and aggregate known as chip seal. He asked Willingham, before calling for the budget vote, which material he intended to authorize his road crews to use.

Willingham assured Graves and the crowd that County Road 1101 — as well as other road projects he will administer until his term expires — would be paved with chip seal in an effort to keep costs down.

The four men running for the two associate commissioner seats — Keith Smith, Darrell Hicks, Stanley Yarbrough and Willy Hendrix — all attended both the rally and the commission meeting.

In one of the most dramatic turns anyone took at the public microphone — and with the day’s businesses imminent — Hendrix stepped forward and addressed Williams directly.

“Doug, look at me,” Hendrix said to Williams, who along with Willingham had kept their gazes turned downward for much of the proceedings. “I’m asking you to do what’s right. Everybody in here is asking you to do what’s right. Wayne — same for you, sir. And that’s all I’ve got to say.”

While the future associate commission lineup wasn’t happy that any budget, already nearly a month delayed, had to be passed ahead of their taking office, they were nonetheless pleased — as were those who’d come to the meeting with their venom — when the commission took up the matter of fronting the defendants’ bond. The result, so far as those 200-plus in attendance were concerned, was exactly the treatment they’d hoped their morning rally’s fiery opposition would prescribe.

The bond measure — along with the associates’ attempts at recent commission meetings to authorize open-ended payment to a Birmingham law firm for legal work on the GUSC’s and SCCD’s behalf; to award a five-year contract extension to SCCD / water department manager David Bussman; and to contract the county to sell water to the SCCD — had all become fighting points for one of the most bizarre deliberations by a public body in recent memory at the commission’s Oct. 7 meeting, when Williams and Willingham passed those items at the very end of a day-long session Graves had already declared adjourned and then walked away from.

The passage of those items in a dubious procedural setting precipitated a lawsuit the very next day, filed by the four men seeking the two associate commissioner seats Williams and Willingham are about to vacate. The suit also brought forth a circuit court order temporarily restraining the commission from acting upon nearly all of those issues.

After some back and forth Tuesday between the associates and Graves — a two-to-one power bloc whose working relationship has been merely functional, at best, ever since the late-April meeting at which Williams and Willingham created the heavily-litigated utility boards — Williams and Willingham capitulated and agreed to take no action whatsoever on the item.

That kills any prospect of the county’s attachment to the bond. By law, the topic must come up again at the next county commission meeting as an “old business” agenda item, but that commission will be composed of three elected officials who, to a man, have said they will make every effort to disentangle the county from any future obligations that would support the two utility boards.

Attorney Steve Griffith, whose firm is representing the plaintiffs in multiple lawsuits against both the commission and the two boards, called the non-action a victory for Cullman County and its water customers.

“The significance of the commission choosing not to take up the bond vote today,” said Griffith, “is that it keeps the checkbook away from Wiley Kitchens and Ron Stone.” Kitchens and Stone hold seats on both the GUSC and the SCCD boards, and have become unpopular choices among opponents who feel those bodies were stacked from the beginning with ex-politicians who never let their agendas for county water die after they failed to retain their elected offices.

From the angry demonstrators’ point of view, the bigger victory may have been an item that didn’t make it onto the meeting agenda at all. A carte blanch resolution Williams had previously attempted to have placed on meeting agendas — one which he and Willingham did, in fact, place on the agenda after resuming the Oct. 7 meeting Graves had declared adjourned — was never even mentioned.

That measure would have obligated the county to pay unspecified current and future legal fees to the Birmingham law firm of Johnston, Barton, Proctor & Rose for defense work done on behalf of the GUSC, the SCCD and the commission on the Supreme Court appeal.

Williams said after the meeting that the attorneys’ payment, as well as the bond posting, were superfluous measures, so far as the county is concerned, because the commission is under a court injunction not to resolve any measures that alter its disposition in the Oct. 8 lawsuit.

Willingham said the entire public demonstration had been superfluous.

“What you saw here today is the definition of mob rule,” said Willingham afterward. “If our founders had wanted us to have a pure democracy, they would have instituted a pure democracy. But we are elected to make some tough decisions on behalf of the people, and I feel like we’ve done that, I don’t care how much they turn out just to be so vocal at one meeting. People just really don’t understand what we’re trying to do. Why, I mean, why? — would I want to hurt this county? I’ve lived here all my life. I’m going to live here. Why would I be guilty of doing everything that this mob of people has showed up here and accused me of? We’re elected to make tough decisions, and boy, if this hasn’t been one tough decision after the other.”

Williams offered a similar view, adding that the gush of opposition at the morning’s rally was purely an emotional response to a political red herring dangled by high-level candidates seeking to gain an advantage in the coming general election.

“Zeb Little is a hypocrite,” a strident Williams began. “This whole issue has given him a reason to jump out here in front of people so that he can keep himself on the front page of your newspaper. There is a reason behind this [utility] board. We need a board to cover our park system; we need a board to cover our sanitation system — because it protects Cullman County’s general fund. That is what we have been trying to do, and I can feel good about it. It needed to be done. Look at all the other boards we have appointed people to serve on — economic development; park board members; hospital board members. They’re not elected by the people; they’re appointed by the county commission.

“This board is no different from any of that,” he continued. “And people show up here for one day — today — trying to say some terrible, terrible things about my character; about Wayne and me both. But, since April, not once — not once — did any of these people who stood outside on the courthouse steps today approach me and voice their concerns with me, or show any desire to understand what it is we were trying to do.”

Despite their frustration, Williams and Willingham both appeared relieved to have escaped the Sword of Damocles; expressing genuine relief that the meeting, for all its tumult, had somehow remained orderly; that things never got physical — and, mercifully — that it was short. Even they had braced themselves for the possibility that the meeting could get ugly, and that it could last the whole day.

When the pair headed outside to enjoy a cigarette at the meeting’s end, they both expressed some satisfaction with the way it had all gone.

“It could have been worse,” Williams said. “It could have been a lot worse. I really feel like one day, people can look back and realize that what we did — what we have tried to do — was for the benefit of Cullman County. The water issue is not the only issue, but people jumped on this thing, and then it just took on a life of its own. But I can leave office now knowing in my heart that what I did was right.”



* Benjamin Bullard can be reached by e-mail at bbullard@cullmantimes.com or by telephone at 734-2131 ext. 270.