FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
State Rep Jennifer Fidler - Jeff Poor Show - Monday 7-29-24
[music] Look back to the Jeff Moore show at the talk. 106.5, they just stick it with us on this. On this Monday morning, look at this, it takes on 2513430106 celebrating, how are you celebrating the Kamala Harris honeymoon, let me know. That's sad, who's better Hillary or Kamala Harris, Hillary 60 or Kamala Harris 2024 because I found Hillary to be way more formidable as an opponent, I would have thought 16 that I do this Vice President, but I'll see where this goes, it just feels a little like to feel it, these kinds of start to feel way overconfident to me and Democrats tend to jump to sharks sometimes, you just wait, they can't do this for 99 days, but joining us now on, well here in the Fair Hope Bureau, always a pleasure, getting there in a week early here, just to juggle with some vacation time and sometimes away, a state representative, Jennifer Fiddler, a representative, good morning, how are you? I'm doing great. How are you doing, Jeff? Doing well, doing well. Thanks for coming by. We appreciate it. Well, since we last talked, any new developments in your world, just a busy week last week, we did a, I was at a couple of different Republican events, a South fallen Republican women met last week, the point clear Republican women actually put on a fish fry Saturday night. Ocollo is Ocollo raised thousands of dollars for the veterans court. We had probably 20 elected officials that handed out food, gave out food and was dishing out the food for all the people that came to the Ocollo event and raised a lot of money. That's good to hear. I've been meaning to get to one of their meanings, I just always forget. Point clear, I mean, there's so many groups, right? Well, now they're four because North ball and Republican women have now branched off and started their group. They're in their infancy stages, but all these Republican women groups are very strong. Lots of times the South ball and Republican women and the point clear Republican women meet on the same day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and then we've got Eastern Shore that meets on a Thursday and then they've started a night meeting. Yeah, they had the sheriff the other night, I saw, they got the speaker coming this next week from Thursday, I'll be out of town, but Speaker Ludbutter. So if anybody can go to that, Speaker Ludbutter is our Speaker of the House and he is going to be speaking at Eastern Shore, Republican women. We have a big conference here at the Grand Hotel. Our lawmakers are becoming down to a BCA BCA, but they get excited about that. Business, business council of Alabama, there's a lot of lawmakers that'll be there, a lot of the business, large business lives of those lawmakers, man, I'm telling you, whatever I'm in, some gathering, oh, yeah, I love it. Oh, yeah. I loved it to grand. The BCA and we love everyone coming down and shopping and supporting some economic development in our downtown Fair Hope and I know lots of folks go over to Magnolia Springs to Jesse's and enjoy Jesse's restaurant when they're down here. So we appreciate all that. Jesse's, Jesse's, it's hard to beat it than I represent it. It is. It's upscale fine dining over there, not too too upscale because you can still get a hamburger for 15 bucks, I think, but, but it's, yeah, it's, I got to eat there last week. We had the commissioner of Alabama Department of Economic Development down, uh, commissioner Boswell was down and, uh, we were able to eat at Jesse's just last week, Magnolia Springs is doing some new things and asking for advice and so we were down hosting him and I was able to see him last week. That's good to hear. Well, uh, let's kick it off here and we were talking sort of during the break. This has been a theme for, for a while now, maybe even years, the, the overwhelming, the overwhelmed ball mechanic corridor and what happens in ball county guys is it's obviously a tourist destination one or a destination snowbirds or a temporary destination, uh, the whole up for the winter, uh, until the weather gets back to, uh, I mean, the summer and then they head back north or whatever, but you have a, a kind of a transient population, at least to some degree and when the end of life comes, uh, unfortunately it does happen. Uh, you have a coordinator here who is just grossly overwhelmed, it seems, and not prepared for this sort of population. We have so many, uh, folks coming down, uh, from other areas vacationing in our areas and really does burden a lot of different departments. The coroner is one of them and we should pride ourselves in making sure that we know causes of death and they are thoroughly investigated. And right now we're, we're at a point that we are being overwhelmed. The capacity of what we have currently needs to be upgraded. And thankfully we have a coroner who has a vision that, that seems to be something that would be able to work in a regional manner, uh, developing a building that has forensic capabilities more so than we have now, actually working with community colleges and the college system that, that in mobile and regionally. So he has really a plan to get on top of this surge in, um, deaths, about 15% of the cases that he looks at are not from here, they're not from Baldwin County. And I think along with any tourist destination that's here in the, in the, in the, in the state of Alabama, if we're have so that much of an influx, we should be somehow helping some of these agencies. I mean, district attorney's office, sheriff's office. This is the coroner's office, but those, this is, the funds are needed to really get him up to where he needs to be to really do the service of coroner and making sure these investigations of death are done in a thorough manner and timely manner and be able to get back to the loved ones of the people who died and I know how much of it is just the growth of this county. Well, I mean, of course that's a, that's a huge factor too. And I do have those stats right here. Um, let's see in, um, I mean, it's just, and I'm not being out, I've got a couple pieces of paper here, so, um, there were 2,337 souls who were lost last fiscal year. Um, there's 260,000 residents in Bowen County and about 6 million people come in as tourists. Uh, said the population increase on 260, you know, we see that in the census, how much it's increased. But yeah, a lot of that is population and, um, FY 22 and 23, 625 of the 2,337 deaths that were lost, um, the coroner took care of 27% of all those deaths. And so that rose from in 2018, it was 24% of the deaths, but 479 out of 2,067 deaths. So if you could keep up with those numbers, um, but quite a bit, just on population. And then the tourism on top of it, 15% of all deaths is our tourists, our people come in here from out of state and Bowen County has been taxed with making sure those deaths are processed. So the fix is a funding fix or well, we're hoping we'd like he has asked and I just think we're fortunate to have a coroner right now that has the passion and the vision to be able to really consider doing something regionally. If we could partner with mobile partner with Washington counties, can be counties in some of our lower counties here that do not have the, um, the availability to be able to put a building in place that we can work with, you know, some of our neighboring counties. And then we have a college system here that we could actually, it could be an educational thing, you know, in North Alabama, Jack State does an absolute fabulous job there in North Alabama. You're probably familiar with the criminal investigation units up there and how they work with Jack State and the forensic science they have there, the police academy, the state police academy, that all our police officers go to and be able to go through training. And right there in those buildings, they have state of the art forensic, I got to visit some of that last year, I'm so impressed with what they've got going on and how they do their crime scene investigations and how they actually track down criminals in their area. And, you know, the north, southern part of the state, we're at that point where we really need to up that. I know the county commission is interested in really seeing this building too fruition, I feel like they are. I've heard good reports that they are, but they probably need some help with funding. Well, I mean, is it, are you thinking like that you need a, like the education, like the teaching, like something that's south Alabama or coastal or wherever, or is it just, hey, we just got to get this guy some funds so he can upgrade his facilities and have more space and maybe more staff or what do you, what do you think there? Well, if there's a tie into education, I believe that it's justified. And even, you know, an appropriation of the Ways and Means General Fund if the chairman and the, you know, the committee so fits in the, and the legislature so, you know, so Jesus, it's definitely a need to for the area and for, you know, for the service to the Alabamaans who come here and for our visitors alike. Join my state representative for Fiddler here in the Fair Hope Bureau, see what else here we got. I know we spent a lot of time on this last week talking about ag in this state. Well, what does it look like and I tell me a Parker Griffith on, it gives us kind of a North Alabama report. What are you hearing from your farmers because the weather's been kind of weird, I don't know. And is it what's really struggling, what's really coming in this year? Well, the, we've had, it's not like last year, you know, we had the terrible drought since last year and family, small farm merchants were really hurt if they didn't have irrigation. This year, you know, we're not having that issue depending on what your souls are. So last week, we talked a little bit about prime agricultural farm lands and a lot of our soils about four foot deep, three, three and a half foot deep, you get into a really hard pan where if we get about 40 inches of rainfall, that that rainfall doesn't have time to see through that hard pan and you will have, and this is why a lot of septic tanks wouldn't, you know, wouldn't work or haven't worked in the past decades because there's this hard pan. And when we get those 50 inches of rainfall, which were not uncommon to get in this area, the water just sits, you know, between the hard pan and that 36, 38, 40 inches of soil surface there. And if we have too much rainfall and if you, those farmers have that type of soil that they're trying to farm, their crops are going to rot, you know, they're, they're just not going to do, but you can run cattle on it. So when I say prime agricultural farmland, I'm talking about the farmland that actually drains and that we can turn over a crop that any kind of crop, even though it rains 50 or 60 inches here, if that makes sense. Well, the mosquitoes are so bad because of that hard pan, just the standing water. I got it. They're really bad this year. I just. Okay. Jeff, you know, I was the public works director and I was over all the mosquitoes spray in at the city of Fairhope at one time. So any standing water, mosquitoes will breed in anything like half an inch to six inches of cup, like eating magnolia leaves. If you have water just sitting anywhere in an old tire or container within a hundred foot of your yard, so all my neighbors in front of here are having the same complaint that we have. Like it just, it just seemed to be a lot worse than they've been the last couple of years. Well, it was a drought last year, so that was one reason why, but the any type of standing water, magnolia leaves, leaves, debris, containers, saucers out there that you, because we had some rain water, you may have a half inch or, you know, a quarter inch of rainfall, you know, just within a hundred feet of your back door, just kind of case that and look. And then if you've got standing water, you can't get rid of the larva side tablets is how you take care of the eggs. And then the city is supposed to be spraying and whenever I was in charge, we did cedar oil, which was that it encouraged the lightning bugs, but it took care of the mosquitoes as well. I don't know. We're getting that same kind of treatment this year, but I just started to digress on you there. Real quick before we get a break here, are you keeping up with this police bill and that what your colleague reading room and wants to do with the takeover? I've, no, I have not. So I can't. And I've been interested in reading some more about it because I did. We did talk about it last year in session or this past couple of months ago, and session. And I do believe that there's a need. You know, we've got to figure out how to address it. I do agree that there's an issue that it needs to be. We need to look at it. I have not read his bill and hadn't talked to him in the last month or so. But like I said, about three or four months ago, we were all sitting around and talking and know that there is something that has to be needs to be done. Well, anyway, we'll just get a quick break in here. We'll pick it up on the other side because I want to finish this discussion. State representative Jennifer Fiddler here with us in the studio. Stay tuned. This is the Jeff Ors Show. I've been talking about O6-5. People said it was useless. And people love the blues. Oh, skirt as slow as the finest pick up to ever play the blues. I saw the light. I saw the light. No more darkness. No more. No more. Now I'm so happy no sorrow inside. Pray the Lord. I saw the light. Welcome back to the Jeff Ors Show. If I'm talking about O6-5, they just stay with us on this Monday morning. Still with us. State representatives here for Fiddler are sitting in for just a few more minutes. So we were talking about the police bill or what reading or would have, which essentially guys to catch you up, um, failing police departments, not so much mobile. Maybe Percher would fall into this category, Selma, Bessimer, but Montgomery and Birmingham seem to be the ones that are getting the lion's share, the media tension. If you have a failing situation where public safety is in peril where you have a high violent crime or murder rate or something, then the police department, the local police department just can't hire enough police. Well, representative Ingram's bill would have the state come in and take over that department with a, they would appoint a police chief who would try to get things in order. I don't know, it's sort of like the Accountability Act with education and when failing school systems, the state comes in. But what's interesting to me representative was waddling a van, uh, not exactly a tea party, John Birch Society conservative, like came out and supported this, that I think these lawmakers are hearing from constituents in these cities and they want the state to kind of take the lead here because some of the municipal governments can't get it done. Well, I mean, and the conversations that we had several months ago were we've got an issue in the state and we don't need to let it get out of hand. And once a city municipality, county reaches a certain percentage of, you know, should that be a trigger to do something? Should we get in there and have this? And just assuming that that is, you know, some of the stuff that, you know, we, those conversations and now we've got this bill and representative Givain, I did get to read her or the article in 1819 news and she knows she has an issue there. I mean, there's an issue and it's undeniable and it affects the safety of our citizens. And we all should be concerned, you know, anywhere in Alabama where we have the safety of our citizens that are in jeopardy. I don't mean to make the self-serving, but Montgomery, where state government has to operate, it has to operate safely. Well, I mean, like when I saw the bullet holes in that building with the green rooftop, one of those RSA office buildings, and you think, well, that's really close to the state house. I mean, does it spend a lot of time there? And does it does it feel unsafe to you or? Well, we know that we've had representatives just a few years ago that were mugged in downtown and nobody really wants to talk about it. But when it happens to your senators that are actually just walking downtown and thankfully, there were these, you know, farm boys, so to speak, that, you know, they didn't get, the muggers didn't get the best of them. But if it happens to us, any of us that are up there, it's happening to everybody. You read it on Facebook, you read it in the news, these people that are just in regular, ordinary areas, neighborhoods that should be safe, that are, you know, that are getting shot. It's not, yeah, we gotta, I mean, that's, that's not right. It's kind of forced the state to do so, inevitably. I feel like we should, you know, we've got a lot of people moving to our area. And why, you know, look at the reasons why they've left. When I talk to people that have moved here from Mobile, it's crime. Our senator, if they're coming in, we'll do it again in a few weeks, but we'll talk to you soon. Thank you, Jeff. All right, this is FIT Talk, 106-5. Every camera knows if the scene