City Dope

Life During Wartime

originally published October 17, 2001

IF YOU'RE LIKE CITY DOPE, you enjoy breathing. Let's take a deep breath now, shall we? In through the nose, out through the mouth. Feels good, huh? But unless you're wearing a respirator or similar device, you may have just damaged your lungs, because the air in Athens is often unfit for human consumption. It will only be made worse if ACC officials and the Enron corporation have their way. As some of you know, the Commission will soon decide whether to allow the company to build a 560 megawatt power plant here, and the odds are very much in Enron's favor, you and your lungs be damned. See p. 7 for the gory details.

HEADS UP (AGAIN). There are rumblings that Athens-Clarke County may raise fees for sidewalk café seating. Sources indicate that several downtown business owners are already in on the discussions in hopes to avoid the stealth nature of this spring's alcohol license fee hikes. Even so, expect to see those anti-Commission fliers start popping up on storefronts again any day now.

COMMISSIONERS ARE SERIOUS about relieving the county's affordable housing crunch. So serious, in fact, that they devoted nearly half an hour to the issue at their October 9 work session. Unfortunately, those 1,800 seconds yielded far more questions than answers - and little wonder, with John Barrow spouting nonsense about mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods. Where does he think he is, a socio-economically diverse urban center or something? Beam us up, Scotty!


city-doughaines.jpgATHENIANS WILL GO TO THE POLLS November 6 to vote on a new $87 million school SPLOST. This is a tough one. On one hand, the Clarke County Board of Education tore through the last SPLOST like MC Hammer (see VH-1's "Behind The Music"), paying for brand new gyms with no air conditioning without knowing exactly how or why. But now the Board has appointed overseers to protect the board from itself, and to protect the money from the board. With roofs still leaking and kids and teachers still crammed into 80 trailers system-wide, no one doubts the schools need the money. And since the loot will go to the construction industry, even fiscal conservatives can get behind the program. Think of it as a bleeding heart economic stimulus package.


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DO YOU KNOW WHO'S VISITING your child's school? Does the Clarke County Board of Education know? When the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus came through town last month, clowns were allowed to visit several schools to promote the big show. City Dope wonders if anyone within the district was aware that "Smiley," former star clown for Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros., was just convicted of child sodomy, sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child. Smiley, AKA Christopher Bayer, no longer works for the circus, and none of its current clowns should be deemed guilty by association. But still.

THE ATLANTA HIGHWAY AREA Transportation Master Plan (TMP) reared its hideous head again at an October 8 public forum. Business interests were on hand to gripe (shock!) about center medians and the TMP's paltry number of parallel access roads - which are about the only provisions in the plan for achieving its supposed goal of improving safety and traffic flow. (For more on this topic, see the recently approved Barnett Shoals Road plan and its $3 million turn lane.) Seeing as how private industry seems to dictate road design in Athens, why not do away with the Transportation half of ACC Transportation and Public Works and turn the whole she-bang over to the Chamber of Commerce? Because then the big babies would have to pay for all that road construction, and that would never work - they're only interested in putting your money where their mouths are.

Send your city dope to bradaaron@flagpole.com

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