Helpless Hands

"I don't know what the forces are," Herpin tells the board, "all I know is that they are evil."

By the end of the evening, Wilson has managed to coax the board through its agenda. The six urgently needed Head Start leases are almost delayed, but are approved after Wilson and Patterson remind the board that if it doesn't expand its services by January 6, it will lose its Head Start grant. Similarly, the personnel policies, which haven't been revised since 1981, are almost tabled because one board member has inside information that management hasn't sought employee feedback as required by the funding source.

Finally, the board retreats into executive session to discuss rescinding its vote against Lawton; when they come back out for a public vote, the pro-Lawton forces carry the day. Despite the threat of federal sanctions, the concern of investigators, the frustrations of the clients GCCSA is supposed to serve, the agency's status quo, in many ways, continues to be upheld. Later, the mayor's representative, Max Patterson, shakes his head at the mess. He has been a small-town police chief and a big-city financial officer, and he has never, he says, seen anything like this. Nobody really wants to take over Gulf Coast, he says. The headaches are just too enormous. Still, it may come to that; there's no question that the feds can take away the Head Start money and give it to another agency if GCCSA doesn't meet its goals. And at this point, Patterson, a big, calm man with no tendency to rhetoric, doesn't think it will.

"Part of me says you can only do so much as a board member," he says. "Sometimes you just have to let things take their course.