It was more than encouraging to see that home sales in Newton County are up 9 percent from last year, according to a story that appeared in the paper on Wednesday.

Even more encouraging is that according to some local Realtors, the folks who are buying the homes are good solid folks who are looking for a good buy, not just an investment, and many are first-time home owners.

Our county has suffered because developers were allowed to build with little or no restrictions. People who could not afford to even pay their gas and electric bills were given credit access to money that in reality they never had a hope to pay back.

We are confident that Newton County will bounce back and recover from this great economic slowdown we are now in. We hope our elected officials have learned that in order to have good solid growth that plans need to be made on how to deal with growth, how it is going to take place. Better yet, those plans need to be followed.