originally published August 6, 2008

Heads Up: Right around the corner on Thursday, Aug. 14 is Athens’ next public meeting with the Department of Homeland Security about the proposed bio-defense lab, NBAF. Actually it’s two meetings: identical afternoon and evening sessions. This all takes place in Mahler Auditorium at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education; the afternoon session runs from 12:30–4:30 p.m., and the evening session runs from 6–10 p.m. The first hour of each session is an informal open house, the second hour is the presentation by federal officials, and last half of each is the time for formal comment. All the info you want about the meetings is at www.dhs.gov/nbaf.

Keep in mind that this is the last public meeting before the Draft Environmental Impact Statement gets finalized; the final statement is due out in the late fall, with a “record of decision” - in other words, a final choice on a site - scheduled for this winter.

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Last in Line: One of the things that’s interesting about this round of Homeland Security meetings is that Athens is the last one of eight around the country. In addition to their report on the Washington, DC meeting in this issue of Flagpole, NBAF opponents Kathy Prescott and Grady Thrasher are reporting that the recent meeting in Butner, NC was quite a show. The anti-lab activists up there mean it when they say they don’t want Homeland Security in their town. Apparently even a guy dressed up as the Grim Reaper was in attendance. And in nearby Durham, some locals here have pointed out, a panel of city officials is at least giving an official look-over to the impact statement. No word on anything like that happening in Athens, nor on what the local activists might be planning for the night of the big meeting here.

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Watch Out, Now: If you sell alcohol in Athens, you already know you’ve got to be careful who you sell it to, as you can easily get into legal trouble for selling to (or serving) someone who’s under 21. But lots of those kids are still drinking, and plenty of them are subsequently getting caught driving. So, starting Sept. 1, says ACC Solicitor General C.R. Chisholm, you get an arrest warrant with your name on it for serving a minor. The details are in City Pages in this Flagpole.

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Shades of Katherine Harris: Being allowed to run for the office he’s running for is the big question these days for Georgia Public Service Commission candidate Jim Powell. In a nutshell, Powell had his district residency challenged during the primary, and he cleared that challenge in court only to have Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel overrule the court decision just a few days before the primary election (which Powell won with 85 percent of the vote, having got himself back on the ballot in the nick of time).

Now, the Democrat Powell - who, by the way, is a knowledgeable guy who’s talking for real about developing renewable energy sources - is still in a battle with Handel, trying to keep his name on the ballot for this fall’s general election against Republican Lauren “Bubba” McDonald. Secretary Handel, of course, is a Republican. How transparent is that? And isn’t it creepy that Karen Handel has the same initials as the former Florida Secretary of State infamous for getting Al Gore out of George Bush’s way? Whoever’s out there writing our modern-day political theater ought to be able to do better than that.

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More Important than it Sounds: It’s becoming quite a tradition in Georgia to see referenda regarding state constitutional amendments on the ballot each election year, and this fall will be no exception with three property tax-related amendments (no, none of them would eliminate taxes) on the slate. Of course, this is a bad habit that state lawmakers have gotten into, and there ought not be so many amendments on the ballot all the time. Still, the folks at the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia are making an effort to explain the amendments this year, and their meeting near Athens to that end is on Thursday, Aug. 7 from 10 a.m. to noon at the Jackson County Courthouse in Jefferson.

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Yeah, He’s In: In case you were wondering, District 10 ACC Commissioner Elton Dodson has dropped all that talk about whether or not he belongs in the race for his Commission seat this year. City Dope caught up with Dodson last week, and he says he is indeed running against challenger Mike Hamby, not stepping aside as he briefly said he might back in the end of June (and as City Dope reported in the July 2 edition of this column).

“I wanted to take a step back and make sure that I was making the right decision for the community,” Dodson says now. (So, he was thinking out loud a little bit.) To recap, Dodson was thrown for a loop when Hamby - also presumably a pretty liberal-progressive guy, like Dodson, but one with pretty close ties to Mayor Heidi Davison, whom Dodson’s been clashing with lately - stepped up to run against him. He worried that a race between two liberals would just be divisive, and he worried, frankly, that he himself was no longer able to give enough time and attention to his duties as commissioner. That’ll be largely fixed, he says, because he’s just now closing on the sale of his business, Firefly Aviation, which ought to open up worlds of time in his schedule.

But also, Dodson sounds a lot more convinced of himself than he did five weeks ago. He says he’s got reason to run: mainly, he has goals of doing more to make the ACC government more open and more transparent than it already is. More details on Dodson’s ideas - plus those of Hamby as well as the two guys, Red Petrovs and Ed Robinson, running for Carl Jordan’s to-be-empty seat in District 6 - are bound to come out as the fall campaign season gets into full swing.

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Ill Winds: In the continuing, somewhat mysterious turmoil about the financial management of his Congressional office, Rep. Paul Broun lost his chief of staff last week. What all’s going on up there, anyway? Politically minded citizens want to know, Doctor.

Ben Emanuel

Send your city dope to ben@flagpole.com.