Newton Citizen

It was no surprise to me when reading about the current Rockdale Clerk of Courts Ruth Wilson keeping passport fees for her own personal income. You either have someone in office serving with the voters/citizens best interests in mind or those that serve with their best interest in mind.

In this case, a public official keeping fees paid by the taxpayer to a government-funded office is certainly not in the best interest of the public. There are many things in life that might be legal to do, but that certainly doesn't mean that it is the right or best thing to do.

It was stated that our prior clerk of court had no comment on this issue. There is really no need for her to comment. Time after time the Rockdale Citizen reported when Ms. Joanne Caldwell was in office what she did with this money. Time after time when Ms. Caldwell was running for office she told how this money was used or going to be used in her administration.

You can pretty much determine what type of public officials we have in two of our commissioners as well -- Mr. Oden and Mr. Nesbitt. One commended Ms. Wilson for proposing to only keep 50 percent of fees collected by work done by publicly funded employees and the other called to see what was done in the past with this money, instead of just calling for the right thing to be done and all fees collected be used in an ethical way.

It is hard to believe that this was not a campaign issue when Ms. Wilson first ran for office. If she stated at that time she was going to keep these fees, then I guess we got what we asked for. At least this time around there should be no question when voters go to the polls whose best interest is being served by this candidate.

-- Mitch A. Bradford

Conyers