Dean’s math skills questioned

Editor:

I hope Madison County Board of Supervisors Chairman Eddie Dean was misquoted (in the June 11 Eagle) when he said that he saw no difference between the $167,000 offer recently made for the Criglersville school by a private enterprise and the $100,000 offer previously made by a local religious group. As a mathematics teacher, he should easily have noticed the obvious difference of $67,000, but if he didn’t then perhaps that oversight explains some of the county’s financial problems.

As an administrator, he should also have taken note of the fact that, if consumated, the enterprise buying the “old school” would become a tax-paying unit, whereas the church group would not have.

And finally, it is almost a certainty that, in the short term, the sale would have created construction jobs to take care of the needed renovations.  In the long term it’s likely that the enterprise would have added at least a few jobs to the permanent payroll. This difference in jobs created is perhaps negligible since the church group might also have made renovations and added a few jobs, but the possibility exists that the church would have gotten “volunteers” to do the work.

In any case, it seems to me that these differences should have been noticed by the chairman.

Frank Dixon
Criglersville