County Commissioner Fred Skillern has a legendary reputation around the county courthouse for his exercise of raw political power — and intimidating manipulation of some of his fellow commissioners — in pursuit of his misguided personal agenda to control the county school board and the school system’s superintendent. But the general public has rarely been given a window through which to see how Skillern works, and the unbridled attitude he brings to his myopic mission.
The public at last got a good glimpse of that Thursday morning when this paper’s county government reporter Ansley Haman detailed Skillern’s unvarnished tirade against Commissioner Greg Beck and Superintendent Rick Smith outside the commission’s meeting chambers.
“His ass is mine,” Skillern said of Smith, while sitting in the commission’s mail room and scolding Beck for opposing his efforts to block release of $1.1 million in PILOT funds to the school system. “You let me down again,” Skillern admonished Beck, who moments earlier had come out on the winning side of a 6-3 vote by the commission to release the funds to the school system.
Skillern, who last year led the controversial move to wrongly withhold those funds, ranted to Beck about Smith, the man he had previously tried to install as superintendent over former superintendent Jesse Register and his successor, Jim Scales, both of whom were ultimately hounded out of their jobs by a Skillern-led faction of the commission because they would not bend to the commission’s attempted dominance of the school system.
“Rick Smith has lied to me, he’s lied to me, and he’s lied to me,” Skillern said. Raising the specter of his role in removing Register, he went on to suggest not just to Beck, but also to Commissioners Joe Graham and Warren Mackey, that he had the power to make or break a superintendent.