GREENSBORO – The director of the West Alabama Regional Commission is taking exception to Hale County Commissioner Lois Fields.

The Executive Director Bob Lake

emailed a response to The Demopolis Times article entitled “Fields: Knox not in district” that ran in the Friday, July 30 edition. Lake wants the readers to know the true facts about the meetings that were held and what was said.

Lake said, “There are several discrepancies in this article. The first is that Ms. Cory Johnson did not attend either the July 27th or July 29th meetings with the Hale County Commissioners nor did she talk to them at any point about this matter.

Second, the commissioners were not told a commissioner came to our office in May and requested a change in the districts involving Akron. They were told that a lady from the county commission office came to our office requesting an enlargement of a map she brought with her. We did not prepare the original map.

“The 1990-districting map used in the last county commission election was not prepared by the West Alabama Regional Commission. The map Commissioner Fields is interested in was prepared as one of several working maps that have been used or adopted and contains an error. For this reason we did not hand it out.”

“I repeat again that no map used in the previous Hale County Commission election was prepared by WARC. The County Commission is responsible for keeping up with the voting maps adopted and used in elections,” he said.

“The person the two commissioners spoke to was David Norris, not Cory Johnson.”