Dear Editor,
“It’s a mighty thin pancake that has only one side.”
One of my favorite colloquialisms, and it never rings truer than when applied to social media.
As the debate over the Putnam County Development Authority’s decision to offer tax abatements to a developer willing to build much-needed affordable housing has reached a fever pitch on Facebook, it’s worth remembering that there is — annoyingly, for some — another side to the argument.
In a discussion yesterday with someone I respect greatly, he agreed that incentives for developers providing affordable housing are necessary. His concern wasn’t whether incentives should be offered, but that the PDA’s offer was excessive. I asked a simple follow-up question: “How much would the right amount be?”
Crickets. For the record, I don’t know whether the abatement was too much, too little, or exactly right. Before this controversy showed up in my feed, I couldn’t have told you who all even served on the Development Authority. I took the time to look. I now know four of the five members well, and there is one in particular whose integrity, professionalism, and business judgment I would put up against literally anyone in this county.
Take five minutes — I suspect it won’t be hard to figure out who she is.
I calculate the probability that Facebook vigilantes are more informed and better positioned to determine the appropriate incentives to achieve the desired outcome than the five members of the PDA to be roughly the same as the Falcons winning the Super Bowl this year. I assign the same probability to the notion that these board members are not acting in what they genuinely believe to be the county’s best interest.
It is remarkably easy to seize on one sliver of information that appears to confirm a pre-existing belief and then conclude that anyone who disagrees must be either stupid or corrupt. That is not insight. It is laziness with a megaphone.
And accusing someone of committing a felony — armed with nothing more than a single open-records request and no effort to gather additional context — is, at best, unfair. More likely, it is mean-spirited, reckless, and quite possibly libelous. It also ignores a basic reality: for such accusations to be true, the other four members of the board would have to be either complicit or grossly negligent. (See previous probability analysis.)
None of this means the PDA’s decision shouldn’t be questioned or debated. Healthy skepticism is a feature of good government, not a bug.
But skepticism requires curiosity, patience, and a willingness to engage with facts that may complicate our preferred narratives. If the goal is truly better outcomes for Putnam County — and not just louder arguments — then we owe it to ourselves, and to the people volunteering their time to serve, to argue in good faith and with a little humility.
Complex problems rarely yield to simple villains.
Judson S. Doster, Putnam County