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Clerk of courts elected to state authority
0212 Authority board
Liberty County Clerk of Superior Court Barry Wilkes (third from left), who recently was elected chairman of the Court Clerks Cooperative Authority, stands with members of the authoritys board. - photo by Photo provided.

Liberty County Clerk of Superior Court Barry Wilkes on Jan. 24 was elected chairman of the Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority, the state entity responsible for the creation and operation of Georgia’s Uniform Commercial Code financing statements, real estate, notary public and judicial information systems.
Wilkes, who currently is serving his seventh term of office as Liberty County’s Clerk of Superior Court, has served as vice chairman of the authority since 2001, after his appointment in 2000 to the authority’s board of directors by the executive board of the Council of Superior Court Clerks of Georgia.
“It is a tremendous honor that my fellow board members selected me to chair the board, but it is a great responsibility that I do not take lightly. Fortunately, we have great minds and hard workers on the board. Even though ours is limited in size, the staff is unequaled by any in state government, which makes my job a lot easier,” Wilkes said. “It was with great trepidation that I accepted the nomination. The demands of my job (as clerk of superior, state, juvenile and magistrate courts of Liberty County) and all the other responsibilities I have at home were a consideration.”
The new chairman explained that the authority operates “without ever having received 1 cent of funding from local, state or federal taxes. Instead, it operates on funds derived from user-based fees, which are assessed on UCC and real estate documents filed in the superior court clerks’ offices throughout the state.
“My estimates are that various governmental agencies and departments of Liberty County — not just the clerk’s office — have received over a half million dollars combined in equipment, consulting, technological assistance and high-speed communications and funds for recreating real estate records from the authority,” Wilkes said.
“Although the authority provided this assistance to enable us (clerks’ offices and other governmental entities) to do our jobs, as a result of mandates required for the UCC and real estate information systems and other projects, what we have received has helped us locally to advance technologically and to create other systems for doing other jobs that are not even related to the authority projects.
“I’ve always known where we need to go technologically in this office, but I’ve never been willing to ask for funding from local tax dollars. We don’t have the financial resources locally. So, I am extremely thankful for everything we have received from the authority,” Wilkes said
“As I said back in 2000 when I became a member of the board, I am deeply committed to the authority, what it has accomplished since its creation and what it is doing for those of us in the trenches who are trying to provide excellent services to the citizens of our counties without putting more tax burden on their backs. It’s a paradigm of how government ought to work and how simple solutions to complex problems can be solved without taxing everyone to death.”

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Book review: Author digs into mining's complicated past and present in 'River of Lost Souls'
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Jonathan Thompson will speak about his book "River of Lost Souls" at the King's English Bookshop on Tuesday, April 3 at 7 p.m. - photo by Amanda Olson
"RIVER OF LOST SOULS: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Spill," by Jonathan Thompson, Torrey House Press, 275 pages (nf)

Plenty has been written about the very small world of a mining town and the very broad reach of a beleaguered industry. From Loretta Lynns iconic song "Coal Miners Daughter," to the 2010 nail-biting coverage of 33 trapped Chilean miners, to the hit Broadway musicals "Paint Your Wagon" and "Billy Elliot," mining is a global story, and its one of heartbreak, hard work and hard times.

Jonathan Thompsons "River of Lost Souls" examines the many facets of risk involved in taking resources from below the earths surface. An environmental journalist, Thompson has reported on southwest Colorado for over 20 years. This book is special, however, because the Four Corners area of Colorado is his current and ancestral home. Thompson is writing about minings ecological, social, financial and political impact on his land, his landscape, his water, his people. That makes "River of Lost Souls" more than a regular reporting job.

Thompson begins with the Gold King Mine wastewater disaster of 2015, which the EPA caused while attempting to drain water near the mines entrance. The spill sent 3 million gallons of waste and tailings into Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animas River and part of the San Juan River watershed which drains into the Colorado, affecting the Utah, Colorado and New Mexico parts of that watershed as well as the Navajo Nation.

From there, Thompson jumps into far stretches of time to 1765, when a Spanish explorer named the Animas River; to 10,000 years earlier, when Paleo-Indians roamed the rivers valley; to the meridian of time, when the ancestors of the Zuni, Hopi and Rio Grande Pueblo people inhabited the land for 500 years; to the mid-1800s and the Swedes who came to Silverton, Colorado, to mine.

Its a grand scope, but telling any story of landscape is telling a very grand story.

It also makes a complex story difficult to follow. Thompsons time warps are important, but they are jarring. His time jumps need clear dates, and Thompson doesnt always make them available. A map would also be useful. Thompsons writing is good, but his sentences can be dense and require readers to do their own mining for the riches the writing embeds. The work is worthwhile, however, as there are many moving parts in any story about mines land, culture, policy, history, money, inevitable disaster and Thompson works to examine all of them.

"River of Lost Souls" is a thoughtful read, but not a quick one. Because Thompsons writings come from 20 years of his newspaper reports, the overall feeling can be disjointed and sparse, which is distracting if one is expecting to follow a tenable thread. This is not a typical narrative with a cast of characters and a traditional story arc. Readers should approach this text as the investigation it is: puzzle pieces of a larger-than-life story that is eons old. If you are the kind of reader who wants it laid out cleanly, this is not that book. But, to Thompsons point, nothing is clean about mining that has never been the case.

Thompsons best writing is in his descriptions of people and places. His telling of how he came to Silverton is familiar and engaging. If readers approach the book with care and attention, they will be rewarded with savoring these descriptive passages when they happen.
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