Sampson County’s Board of Commisisoners gives new meaning to the word flip-flop. Even Sen. John Kerry could learn a lesson or two from them.

This time the flip-flop is regarding construction projects which have been on the county’s radar since 2005, but were dropped down the priority list, then back-burnered and now either slowed again or halted altogether.

Board members cite continuing shaky economic ground and a questionable financial future for the pork industry, a hefty taxpaying block for Sampson County, as reasons for the shift, once again, in thought on whether to move forward with construction of a new C.E. Perry and a child development center on the campus of Sampson Community College.

Both are viable projects and have been since the first USDA dollars were secured back in 2005. Costs have always been astronomical, as is expected with any enormous construction project. And costs have continued to rise as the economy has spiraled, much the same as the costs for the projects that were funded — Midway and Union high schools in the county, a new Clinton High School in the city, along with smaller — but still high dollar — ones like the revamp of the Department of Social Services and Health Department and the redo of the county administrative offices, including the room in which commissioners hold their meetings.

In principle, we agree with commissioners. We do have an uncertain economic future locally and there is a need to hold the line on taxes, thus making additional construction more of a financial burden than the county can bear.

But we contend that commissioners should have thought that through as they jumped headlong into this mammoth build-and-spend whirlwind they’ve been in for the past three or four years. Didn’t they realize the time would come to pay the piper, and that when that time did come, somewhere along the line tax hikes would be needed?

Apparently commissioners, especially the most vocal of them, chairman Jarvis McLamb, didn’t look far enough into their crystal ball. McLamb, who is from the Midway District, never seemed to be bothered by financing the construction of a new Midway High School. But now he’s questioning whether C.E. Perry really is in the dilapidated condition school officials have said and refused to vote for its construction.

Commissioners, excluding Billy Lockamy and Jefferson Strickland, also didn’t have any problem letting SCC president Dr. William Aiken agree to move his project, which was always ahead of schedule and ready to go back in 2005, down the list nor promising that the SCC construction would happen, just later, say in 2010.

Didn’t anyone ever think that perhaps they were eating far more than the county’s finances could possibly digest?

Instead, commissioners made promises, shifted priorities, built schools, funded hundreds and hundreds of dollars for their own nice, comfy chairs, which they leaned back in Monday night and decreed from on high that now they couldn’t afford any more spending, that Perry would have to wait, that SCC’s project would simply have to be halted.

If taxpayers for one minute believe commissioners were making these decisions based on their best interest, perhaps they should look long and hard at the history of the county’s building program, the tax increases that occurred and who benefited the most.

It certainly wasn’t the folks in the Lakewood District where, we contend, the needs were the greatest all along.