Friday, Oct. 30, 2009

Tribute to late mayor makes perfect sense

As the Columbus Consolidated Government prepares for its future, Columbus Council sees a timely opportunity for the city to pay tribute to its past.

It’s a right-minded and appropriate gesture.

Council on Tuesday approved a proposal from City Manager Isaiah Hugley that the soon-to-be-built new city service center on Macon Road bear the name of the late J.R. Allen, the mayor who died in a plane crash in 1973. A state highway and a local school have been named in Allen’s honor, but nothing yet from the city whose government he remade.

The very name “Columbus Consolidated Government” is a tribute to Allen, even if our younger citizens — not to mention generations to come — would have little or no way of knowing that. It was largely his vision and energy that persuaded voters in Columbus and what was then outlying Muscogee County to approve the consolidation of the two governments 38 years ago.

Every progressive benefit that has come this city’s way since, as a result of that consolidation, is a memorial to J.R. Allen and those who worked with him to make Georgia civic history. It was, in fact, a talk on the subject of consolidation that took Allen to Rome, Ga., the day his rented small airplane went down on the way home, claiming the lives of Allen and three other local officials.

There has in recent years been a regrettable reticence here about naming things in honor of even the most deserving of people. Such hesitancy is politically prudent, given the potential for offending this or that individual or constituency. The result — with notable and welcome exceptions like the renaming of Memorial Stadium for longtime civic leader A.J. McClung — has been an unfortunate bureaucratic sterility in the naming of public facilities.

But naming a city services center for J.R. Allen should be, in this community, the ultimate no-brainer. An intriguing addendum to the naming idea is Hugley’s suggestion that the new center could be designed to resemble the old courthouse building on Ninth Street, where Allen was the last mayor to serve before city offices were moved to the new Government Center.

Hugley’s proposed name is the J.R. Allen Consolidated Government City Service Center — on the wordy side, but the right general idea. Longtime Councilor Red McDaniel, who knew Allen well, suggests shortening it to J.R. Allen City Service Center: “When you say J.R. Allen, everybody knows him.” So how about something even simpler and more to the point — the J.R. Allen Center?

These are the kinds of details the city’s Board of Honor can hash out. Meanwhile, kudos to the city manager and council for approving a tribute that is long overdue.