The issue of how cities will be represented on the Coosa Valley Regional Development Commission board has been resolved until the Committee becomes a regional commission in August.
Each of the 10 counties in the CVRDC was represented during a Thursday, March 19, meeting in which the members voted to return to their original bylaws which allow the largest city in each county to have a representative on the board.
The issue came up during the a previous CVRDC meeting after the governor mandated the state's committees be reorganized into commissions, according to Rome Mayor Wright Bagby Jr. The state, he said, determined that each county would have a representative on the board, as well as the opportunity to appoint a representative from the private sector. The way cities would be represented was left unclear.
During that meeting, Catoosa County Commissioner Ken Marks made a motion to reexamine a decision to allow the region's county governments to appoint municipal representatives. That decision, he said, was made after a very close vote. Marks said he felt the need to "see what the rest of the communities wanted to do."
Rome City Commissioner Kim Canada said the vote to let counties decide was made without the required 30 day notice to the board members. "It was done unjustly," he said.
Bagby also said the issue came up without notice at the meeting.
"This deal was cut outside this office; quite frankly I didn't have a chance to think it through," CVRDC Director Bill Steiner said of the rushed nature of the vote.
In the future, a role call will be taken on such sensitive votes, he said. "We want to hear yes or no; we want to know who made the yes or no."
"I saw a lot of people in here I didn't recognize," Fort Oglethorpe Mayor Ronnie Cobb said, adding that he was not sure everyone understood what they were voting on.
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