CARLTON FLETCHER: Albany officials face questions of honor, character in dealing with Rails to Trails

I’m sick and tired of hearing things From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics.

— John Lennon

I don’t think I’ll be belittling myself when I say there’s a lot about our country’s judicial system that I don’t understand.

As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’d be wrong if I said there’s a lot about our country’s judicial system that defense attorneys, prosecutors and judges don’t understand.

So when officials with the city of Albany say the agreement the city signed with South Georgia Rails to Trails in 2015 is not legally binding, that may be so. Perhaps there was a “herewith” or a “thereto” left out of the agreement that will allow some shrewd barrister to have the agreement discounted.

But that’s not going to make anything right in the eyes of people who are on the outside looking in at the ugly disagreement that has the city and SGRT in court now, seeking settlement to an issue that, to simple people like me, seems cut-and-dried.

Back in 2015, the city wanted to buy land owned by SGRT so that its utilities department could expand its reach into parts of the city then not attainable and into bordering Lee County, a potential gold mine for city officials who drooled at the prospect of signing up gas, fiber and electric utilities customers in the fastest growing county in the southern part of Georgia.

SGRT, whose focus has always been ongoing efforts to turn an old rail bed it owned into a walking trail that would become a health and tourist benefit for the region, sold the property to the city when Albany officials agreed to turn the 13.6 miles of the rail bed into a walking trail that ran from downtown Albany through a portion of Lee County into the Sasser community in Terrell County.

The city said it would finish the trail within a five-year period.

The five years came and went. And then another year. And another. And another.

In those eight years, the city of Albany has expanded its utilities into land along the trail bed, bringing in the new dollars it had lusted over for years. Work on the trail, though, has been all but non-existent. So much so, SGRT has taken the city to court, suing Albany for, among other things, breach of contract.

Now here’s the part that I — and others like me — don’t understand. My limited, perhaps naive, knowledge has always led me to the assumption that when two sides come to an agreement based on both sides getting and receiving something, then both sides were bound to honor said agreement. The city has not done so. It’s leadership has, essentially, said, “Tough luck. We got what we wanted … too bad about your part of the deal.”

Again, there may be some fine-print legalese that justifies the city’s claim. Stranger things have happened.

But this issue, to me, is not one of legality. It’s an issue of honor, of character. By refusing to do what it said it would do, the city of Albany — and, by extension, all of its citizens — has shown a complete lack of character. I know, new members of the Albany City Commission were elected, and they led the charge to deny SGRT the promise past commissioners had made. One can assume, then, that if those newly elected commissioners don’t like the fact that, say, the city frowns on parking in the middle of the street during rush hour, they can do so because they decided to vote the rule down.

No, there’s no taking sides on this issue. The city is wrong, absolutely wrong. One of them even went so far as to ridicule SGRT’s efforts to hold them to their solemn promise by saying the contract between the two is “not worth the paper it was written on.”

Conversely, given this group’s lack of character and honor in this matter, I would assume their collective words are not worth the exhalation of air it takes to utter them.