Last year when the Columbia County Board of Education voted to name the county's newest school Grovetown High School, city of Grovetown officials were elated - even though the school is outside the city limits.
City officials are a little less thrilled these days with another area inside the Grovetown mailing zone but outside city jurisdiction: The Arrowood Mobile Home Park.
It has a Grovetown address, but the trailer park is far outside the city. While Grovetown has been trying desperately in recent years to shed its image as a city of chain-link fences and mobile homes, along comes the infamy of the mailing-address link to Arrowood.
Arrowood, on Wrightsboro Road far outside the city limits, has 19 mobile homes that the Federal Emergency Management Agency sold as scrap. Arrowood's New York-based owner, KDM Development Corp., bought the trailers from a broker who paid pennies on the dollar to get them at a HUD auction.
The broker certainly knew the trailers were uninhabitable; whether KDM knew its cheap, used trailers were supposed to have been sent to a junkyard instead of a mobile home park is yet to be determined.
In the meantime, while the city of Grovetown took a step forward with that new school, it shouldn't be forced to take a step back because of Arrowood's mailing address.
And no one should find in this sorry episode a reason to renew faith in the federal government.
icon.