This billboard is minimally competitive with private practices???
In July, I wrote an article about how Craven County Commissioner Scott Dacey’svoting record is at odds with his campaign website which says he “is constantly working toward reducing the size of government.”
Mr. Dacey proffered a piece for the August 3-9 issue of The County Compass. I’m not quite sure if that piece was a rebuttal or a confirmation. In it, Mr. Dacey mentioned that he was the only commissioner to vote against the original Craven County Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) in New Bern, and said that once it was a done deal, he’d worked “to make certain it was implemented with the least possible intrusion into local private health care practices” and “with minimal expansion of government” thus acknowledging the validity of my complaints about competition with the private sector and expansion of government. His complaint seemed to be that I didn’t go back to 2014 to find a vote he made that was conservative.
He then acknowledged that he did vote for the FQHC in Havelock in 2016, but again said he “worked to make certain local health care providers would not be negatively impacted.” Would you call the billboard pictured here an illustration of minimal competition with private practices?
In addressing my complaints about his voting to train 20 clinicians in “grief counseling,” Mr. Dacey said I should be directing my concerns to the General Assembly. Well, our various CCTA committees make a number of trips to Raleigh each year to do just that sort of thing, but if he were a conservative Commissioner, I would expect Mr. Dacey to make his own appeals to the General Assembly on that subject as it is the practice of the Board of Commissioners to make a number of requests to the General Assembly annually.
As to the $500,000 of taxpayer money to be spent on modifying rental property for use as a training center, I did err in saying it was “Craven County” taxpayer money. Mr. Dacey makes a strong distinction between Craven County, state, and federal tax dollars, and I do not. It is all money that comes out of your pocket and mine that would otherwise be available to buy clothes for school, put a new set of tires on the truck, or pay the fellow who repaired the window the children broke playing ball.
As to his having voted to raise the county’s public transportation costs by adding a Municipal Planning Organization “by pretending communities as diverse as New Bern and Havelock were a single community,” I was busted! Havelock wasn’t involved. I should have said “communities as diverse as River Bend and Bridgeton.”
Ah, well, I leave it to you, gentle reader. Was the piece a rebuttal or a confirmation?
