An interview with the new county commissioner

Wayne Harris’ phone wouldn’t stop ringing last Wednesday.

The calls poured in as well-wishers congratulated Harris on winning Tuesday’s general election for the Okaloosa County Commission District 1 seat. The list of callers included several of the current county commissioners and U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller.

Harris, who will take office Nov. 18 before the next county commission meeting, took a break from his busy schedule to talk with News Bulletin Editor Kyle Wright.

Harris discussed the campaign, his priorities as a county commissioner, his future plans as the Executive Director of the Crestview Area Chamber of Commerce — and his wish to see his campaign signs disappear!

Here is an excerpt from the interview.

Kyle Wright: What will be your first priorities as far as learning the ropes as a county commissioner, and what will be your first priorities as far as policy issues as a county commissioner.

Wayne Harris: My first priority is to learn the ropes. I’ve had a number of people from the county call me and try to organize what I’ve got to do and I appreciate that. I’m going to ask a lot of questions. I believe the only stupid question is the question you don’t ask. If I don’t know, I’m going to ask. And I think more questions need to be ask.

Policy issues … I want to emphasize what I ran on, and that is infrastructure needs, essential services and needs, and public safety and security. It should be the county’s priority and it should be any government’s priority. Those three things constitutionally are what we are required to do.
I think sometimes government tries to be everything for everybody and I’m not going to focus on that. We need to focus on the priorities. This is a tight budget time as it is

People ask me what I mean by infrastructure. Let’s think in terms of your house is your infrastructure. If you have a mortgage payment and you spend your mortgage payment money on going out to eat and buying cars and buying clothes and don’t pay your mortgage, what happens?

You lose your house. Infrastructure is the same way. If you don’t spend your money on storm sewers and water and roads and lighting and all those things infrastructure is supposed to provide for you, what happens is they start failing you and you don’t have any money to put into it.

There are 286 miles of roads in Crestview and the north county that are not paved. At the present rate of paving, it’s going to be 28 to 30 years before they get paved. That is unacceptable. We’ve got a road like Kervin Road, taxpayers can’t get ambulance service to them, can’t get police service to them, can’t get school bus service to them, because the road is in such bad shape. We need to suck it up in the county and fix the roads. I would like to see some kind of priority in our paving and step up the paving process significantly. Not all of the dirt roads want to be paved, but they want to be maintained. I personally would like to pave them all. I think it’s unacceptable in 2008 or 2009 to have unpaved roads in our county.

I would like to see some priority on development. We’ve lost hundreds of companies in this area, which is a significant tax base, because we don’t use objectivity; we use subjectivity. We don’t use common sense. We need to do something to fix that. And we need to work better with our cities. We need to reach out if we’re not reaching out. I know we’ve got good relationships with our cities (in District 1), but we need to get a better relationship. We’re all in the county. We’re all in this together. Let’s all work together.

“One of my biggest priorities is I want to see more use of our organizations we have. We’ve got some great organizations (he listed the Institute for Senior Professionals and Okaloosa Citizens Alliance as examples). These are mega-bright people of all different political persuasions working together in a non-partisan environment. There are many more organizations like that that just want to help the county. We need to knock down some of those walls that prevents them from doing that.

Read the full story in the Nov. 15 edition of the Crestview News Bulletin.