Ledger Inquirer: Benches are back, but so is the pole

Do you want the good news or the bad news first?

Being a glass-half-empty kind of guy, I'll start with the bad.

A couple of weeks ago, Concerned Reader Betsy thanked and congratulated me for getting results on the broken and leaning utility pole near the northern end of Buena Vista. I'd seen a flotilla of Georgia Power trucks on that stretch of road not long before, so I figured it would be cleared up.

Well, a while later I was talking to Betsy for another story and she laughed, "I think I might have jumped the gun when I thanked you for getting that pole taken down."

Uh oh.

I rode by there on the way home and sure enough, the broken and leaning pole was still broken and leaning.

Most of it, anyway. And it's still tied off for safety, but not to a chain link fence post, but to another utility pole about 10 feet up the hill.

The wires at the top of the utility pole had been transferred to the new pole, but the lower lines are still on the old, leaning pole.

Regular readers of this feature (and who isn't?) will remember that Georgia Power owns the vast majority of utility poles in town, including this one. Regular readers will also remember that the wires at the top of the poles are always the ones carrying the electricity. The lower ones are cable TV, telephone and natural gas lines.

(Sorry, I was just seeing if you were paying attention.)

Georgia Power can only transfer their lines. It's up to the cable and phone companies to move their lines to the new poles. And they're apparently not in a big hurry to do so.

So we will publicly shame them on the front page of the paper in hopes of getting them to move their lines. And soon.

Betsy is tired of driving past that broken, leaning pole.

Now for the good news. You will remember back in August, when Chuck Williams filled in for me and wrote about the metal bench seats that were stolen from the football field at Shirley Winston Park.

They have now been replaced, and it wasn't as expensive as I'd feared. Parks and Recreation Director James Worsley told me Friday that they'd been replaced at a cost of about $6,500. One reason the cost was reasonable was that a city crew installed them.

They were replaced with identical aluminum benches, Worsley said, "And hopefully they won't get taken."

Let's hope.

This story was originally published October 5, 2014 at 10:35 PM with the headline "Ledger Inquirer: Benches are back, but so is the pole."