Talk of the Town - Welcome back, Potter November 04 2000

REMEMBER MR. POTTER? Remember the uncaring, greedy, ride-roughshod-over-the-rabble financier who was George Bailey’s nemesis in It’s A Wonderful Life? Boy, they don’t make villains like that anymore. Or do they?
Our story doesn’t begin in beautiful Bedford Falls but in booming Alpharetta, along the Fulton-Forsyth County border. It’s an area that has struggled with growing pains, but its people, including several well-organized, don’t-mess-with-suburbia citizen activists, have managed to thwart the most demented plots of avaricious developers.
But as old Tom Jefferson once said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Just when you think things are fine, someone slips a whoopee cushion into the mix.
The infernal device in this instance is a brand new billboard. Some 50 feet high and 576 square feet in size — with a huge mast and deck the Navy could use as a training vessel — it would be right at home advertising malt liquor next to a fume-spewing oil refinery on the New Jersey Turnpike. Except it towers over a residential neighborhood. There isn’t another billboard within a country mile.
That last fact is of small comfort to Diane Peskin. Her home is less than 300 feet from the monster placard. When they turn the juice on to illuminate that sucker, she and other folks in the neighborhood will have the Megawatt Mother of All Nightlights.
Ms. Peskin’s plight was illumined recently on the evening news, and we were all properly horrified. But how did it start? Godzilla billboards don’t just don’t spring up out of the ground, unless our military is working on some really weird top-secret project. (Think of the foreign policy implications: Col. Khaddafi would freak if he woke up to a giant Jack Daniel’s ad in front of his tent.)
Anyhow, enter Debbie Driskell. She is the owner-of-record for the property hosting the billboard. Her husband, Ken, is chairman of First Colony Bank in Alpharetta. Bankers deal in money, and zowie, is there a lot to be made on this deal.
Hook up with a billboard company that covets your locale, sign a long-term contract and you can rake in thousands of dollars every year just by hosting the biggest eyesore in the Western Hemisphere.
I confess to being shocked by this turn of events. Bankers — or, at least the actors who portray them on TV commercials — are kinder, gentler people, itching to give you a loan, a shiny calendar and a hearty handshake. They’re allegedly concerned about the communities where they live and work. I had thought, naively perhaps, that this was the warm-and-fuzzy wave of the future, that don’t-give-a-damn financiers went out with Amos Potter.
And it does remind you of Mr. Potter. Remember George Bailey’s nightmare, when it’s as if he never lived? Bedford Falls turns into Pottersville, a nightmarish vision of electric glare and gaudy signage.
In one 576-square-foot swoop, Debbie and Ken have taken us a long way down that garish, nightmarish road. Although I suspect that their home — and this is just a wild guess — does not have a bungalow-size billboard beaming onto the premises.
But much as the Driskells deserve credit for this debacle, there are other kudos to be handed out. Because to truly screw things up, you have to include the world of government.
Such technical non-support is provided aplenty by Forsyth County, whose officials are doing nothing to refute the unkind stereotype that they are a pack of environmentally challenged, dadgum-it-‘jes-build-it chuckleheads.
The billboard, you see, is on the Forsyth side of the line. And while they have enacted restrictions on such signs over in their sylvan neck-of-the-woods, the luckless folks who will sunbathe in this ad’s wattage live in Fulton County.
Forsyth’s official view closely resembles that of Christopher Columbus’ crew; they seem to believe that the world is flat, and ends at the boundary of their bucolic paradise. They could care less about people living outside it. Probably just a bunch of whiny transplanted Yankees, anyway.
All in all, it’s a quintessentially American story of unbridled greed and indifferent, incompetent bureaucrats. Sadly, it happens all the time. The difference, at least around here, is that hundreds of people in both counties — the ones who, George Bailey said, “do most of the working and paying and living and dying” — are mad as hell. Trust me, they’re going to do something about it.
In the interest of fairness, I considered calling Ken and Debbie Driskell before they’re too busy counting the cash that comes in from this deal to get their side of the story. But then I thought of the way they’ve operated, and their utter disregard for others. They can afford their own newspaper column.
Meanwhile, I was amused by a bit of literature someone passed along from First Colony Bank, which will never have me as a major depositor when I win the Georgia Lottery.
“We will bend over backwards,” the pamphlet reads, “to make our customers know that his or her business is important.”
Funny way you have of showing it.
Welcome to Driskellville.
Glen Slattery lives in a wonderful Alpharetta. E-mail gmslattery@aol.com.