Town Hall Meeting

There is a fairly big shopping center close to us.  The name of it is Sprayberry Crossing, because it is cati-cornered  from Sprayberry  Highschool.   It was nice    but not now.

It has only a  few still-operating stores and a few store-front churches.  The paint is peeling and flaking.  The parking lot is full of potholes. But the worse park is the bowling alley.  The bowling alley is a free standing building riddled tracks of  teenagers having illegal fun, dope, homeless, and you-name it.

The ownership is complicated.  It is owned in seven or eight parcels.  A group of people own some different combinations of the parcels.

A family cemetery is on the property, which they also own.

The general public nearby who live nearby and are aware of the shopping center’s deterioration wants someone to buy the shopping center and give it a face-lift.  The owners are willing to sell, if the residents of the cemetery are moved.

I learned all this from the town hall meeting Anna and I attended Wednesday night.

I mean I knew the shopping center’s condition and rumors of the bowling alley but I did not know about the complexities of the ownership.  I have walked and biked in the shopping center several times.  It is a nice place to exercise in solitude.

 The meeting was organized Joe Glancy, a concerned citizen.  He has talked to the owners and the owners representatives.  He insinuated that they could care less about our concerns.  They want to make the biggest profit possible and they can demand more if there were no dead bodies in a family cemetery
.

At the meeting were our state representatives, two county commissioners, a lawyer from the county’s legal department said, she could legally give them legal advice.  A country property department head, that seemed to know what he was talking about and wordy too.

A couple of things were repeated several times during the meeting;  They are the property owners, and there are property rights; and there are state laws with regulations of moving bodies that they must abide by.

Several people have been working trying to get the deads’ nearest of kin to sign to give them permission to move their loved ones bodies to Sandy Plains Baptist Church, who has agreed to take them.  It was reported that there was only one hold out.  That was our latest update, however, two, maybe three or four people in the theater said they had loved ones there and nobody contacted them.

This is by now a mute point, but according to my GRAVES AND CEMETERY IN COBB COUNTY book the Mayes Family Cemetery had 73 residents when the census was taken in 1984.   That was 34 years ago I bet there are over a hundred residents are there now.  I read in the obituaries that there was a burial there a couple of weeks ago.

During the question and answer period was person with the air of a rebel rouser suggested we all pool our money of all that were there and buy the shopping center.  Somebody estimated there were about 2000 people crammed in.  In the seat in front of me a lady got on her smart phone’s calculator and put it to work and if each of us shelled out either $17,500 or $1750 we could buy Sprayberry Crossing on the spot and do what we wanted with it.  I apologize for not looking more closely over her shoulder to see if was $17500 or $1750, both are the same to me, as far as money I have to invest on the spot without thinking  it through.

Someone else suggested to end them by “death by 1000 papercuts” by suing them as many times as it takes in small claims court, each time a complaint against them is filed will cost them to pay about $1000 for a lawyer’s fee each time.

Some Sprayberry High School students outside made up posters making a general generic statements, like CHANGE! and I saw some conflicting statements.  It is like as you enter you could pick your cause and shake a poster around.  I suppose all that had posters paid for them and some enterprising students got some spending money.  I don’t know how much, if any, was charged for the posters because we got there early to get a good seat, before their posters were ready.  Darn!