James Coffey, Hypocrite

My mother always said, "Beware of a man who can't be embarrassed." Her meaning? Hypocrisy without a conscience is a threat to every living soul.

So there was the chairman of the Watauga County Board of Commissioners, James Coffey, running for reelection, sitting up there with all the other candidates last night at the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce's candidate forum, and when asked what he perceived to be Watauga County's greatest problem, he says, "Growth."

He didn't seem embarrassed at all to be such a grade-A hypocrite.

"Growth." Big problem on October 11, 2004, according to Mr. Coffey, who on every other calendar date in this or any other year has failed to see any problem at all with "growth." Which Sue Sweeting and Pat Wilkie worked tirelessly on for years, advocating the merest baby steps to deal with it, which proposals Mr. Coffey opposed, subverted, whispered negatively about, and outright slandered during that same time.

Take the County's "zoning committee" as just one notorious example. Mr. Coffey served on that panel as a "no-zoner" to study what might be done to regulate the GROWTH of polluting or "high-impact" developments in the county. When the panel of equal numbers of pro-zoners and no-zoners actually finally AGREED that the citizens ought to be given the right to be heard in a "conditional use" permitting process for any new polluting or high-impact developments coming into the county, Mr. Coffey managed to miss that meeting when the unanimous vote was taken. Why? So he could later vote against it. (So he was also lying last night when he bragged that he had a 100 percent attendance record. Perhaps he meant 100 percent attendance at meetings where he was guaranteed to be in the majority.)

Indeed, after the 2002 elections, Mr. Coffey and his new Republican fellow commissioners voted to gut the "High-Impact Development Ordinance" of any provisions that would have given citizens the right to be heard.

Want more hypocrisy? Coffey is pushing Boone to give up its water & sewer to county developers so that the "growth" he said he was so worried about last night can rage on at an accelerated pace. Meanwhile, he's also against ANY controls on that growth. (Maybe he meant the problem with GROWTH is that we haven't yet hit our saturation point, reckon?)

Jesus Christ railed against Pharisees and hypocrites and often conflated the two as the same thing. That is, if you're a Pharisee, in Jesus' eyes you're also automatically a hypocrite. Mr. Coffey just raised his rank among them both.