News & Views You Can Use
Historic Downtown
Tying Up the Loose Ends
originally published August 23, 2006
A historic core of downtown Athens buildings got historic-district protection earlier this month, but it’s still up in the air as to just how downtown interests will be represented in decision-making for the new district. The historic district is a multi-block area covering the oldest buildings, where exterior changes or demolitions must be approved by the local Historic Preservation Commission (HPC). Downtown property owners have asked that two seats on the HPC be set aside for building owners or others with a stake in the area.
But, asked Commissioner Kathy Hoard at the Athens-Clarke County Commission’s legislative review meeting Aug. 15, can’t downtown owners apply just like anyone else to join the HPC? Even outside downtown, she said, some residents aren’t interested in history as much as they are in “how much money they can make how quickly.” Qualifications should go beyond interest in a specific area, she said.
But Commissioner David Lynn - who chaired the citizens’ committee on the downtown historic designation - made the case that downtown is “sufficiently different” to justify some separate representation. “The dynamic of construction downtown is so much different from residential construction,” he said, and it can involve a lot more money. And whether the criticism is warranted or not, Lynn pointed out, some say the county takes too long to approve new projects.
It’s in the larger part of downtown - outside the historically protected core - where most new growth is expected to occur. Less-stringent design guidelines have been proposed for that area, and a proposed “urban design committee” will hear appeals for “exceptional designs” that don’t fit the visual guidelines, Lynn said, “forms of architecture that we can’t even foresee right now.” Lynn’s committee wants the urban design committee to also function as “a separate planning commission for downtown” - a suggestion that didn’t go down well with the present ACC Planning Commission.
“I think there was unanimous opposition,” Planning Director Brad Griffin explained to county commissioners on behalf of the Planning Commission, a standing board of citizens who make recommendations to the Mayor and Commission about land-use issues. Planning Commissioners feel that those recommendations should be made in the context of a broad, county-wide view based on Athens-Clarke’s written land-use plan, Griffin said.
But, argued Lynn, “We’re really talking about appearance-based issues” - and the Planning Commission never rejects designs based on appearances. “We don’t ever say, ‘Your building’s ugly, we’re not going to let you build it that way,’” Lynn said. That, he said, is what a design committee is supposed to do. The much-criticized Gameday Center at the west end of downtown “dotted every I and crossed every T” of county ordinances, Lynn said, but that didn’t make it an appropriate design. “Why not just have one body that’s qualified to do both?” he asked.
And ACC Manager Alan Reddish urged the commissioners at the meeting to outline their concerns about downtown representation to his office, rather than to make all the decisions themselves. “The charter leaves that for the manager to do,” he said. The legislative review committee will continue to discuss the issues next month.
John Huie jphuie@speedfactory.netElectronic Recount
What's The Point?
originally published August 23, 2006
When Athens lawyer Bill Overend formally requested a recount last week in the election for Solicitor General, there was little argument that performing a recount was the appropriate course of action. The vote totals from election night showed Overend trailing C.R. Chisholm by only 33 votes. With a margin that was less than one percent of the total number of votes cast, Overend was entitled by law to an automatic recount if he requested it. But since 2002, Georgia has been using electronic voting machines. (According to the website electionline.org, Georgia is one of 15 states that use electronic voting machines and do not require “voter-verified paper audit trails,” i.e., ballot receipts.) So, a recount nowadays in a state like Georgia involves no hanging chads, no arguing over whether votes were cast or not, no poll workers laboring long hours to determine the winner.
What does a recount involve in the era of electronic voting? Not much. “What we do is upload all the memory cards again,” says ACC elections supervisor Gail Schrader. On election day, each voting machine (there are three per precinct) saves all of its results internally and on a memory card which poll workers remove when the election is over. That night, all the memory cards are fed into a central server at the Board of Elections office downtown. Together with the cards from the five machines used for early voting, plus the optical scans of the paper absentee ballots that arrive in the mail, these results make up the vote totals. The procedure doesn’t change for the recount. “We do that on election night, and then we do the same thing again, just to make sure we’ve got it right,” Schrader explains.
So why do a recount? Mostly, for the same reasons recounts have always been done: to check and make sure, for the sake of voters’ rights as much as candidates’, that all the vote-counting went according to plan. Still, recounts seem a little bit less relevant in the age of electronic voting, when the results are less likely to change very much. John Neiman is a new professor in UGA’s law school - he doesn’t specialize in election law, but while in private practice he helped represent Alabama Governor Bob Riley in a recount dispute stemming from the 2002 election. Neiman points out that all recounts raise some basic questions to begin with: If we’re not comfortable with the election results the first time around, what makes a second count any more reliable? But while conventional recounts seem more and more to leave lingering questions, Neiman agrees that electronic ones, and procedures like the one used here in Athens, present their own problems. “It sounds like it just renders the whole recount useless,” he says.
The recount in the relatively low-profile race for ACC Solicitor General may have been more of a formality than anything else, but it begs the question of how the voting public would feel about an electronic recount in a race with more on the line. “The funny thing about this sort of thing is that no one ever thinks it’s going to happen in the big elections,” Neiman says. He points out that the Alabama state legislature moved to reform recounts there after the dispute involving the 2002 election - but it seems to take a case of that magnitude to move anyone to action. “There has to be a huge slip-up at a major level for any change to be made,” Neiman says. “No one ever anticipates this kind of thing happening.”
Oh, and the results of last week’s recount in the Solicitor General’s race? No change.
Ben Emanuel ben@flagpole.comStream Buffers
When Rubber Hits Road
originally published August 23, 2006
Ben Emanuel
Is this a stream or a ditch? Does it get a buffer? The law says it’s a stream, and the local buffer ordinance protects it, but the Hearings Board can still grant a developer a variance to pipe it, and did so earlier this month.
A new restaurant proposed for Lexington Road will be built on land adjacent to Tuckston United Methodist Church. The site features two small intermittent streams, so earlier this year, its developers asked for a variance (an exemption) from the county’s stream buffer ordinance. That ordinance, adopted in 2000, extends the state’s required 25-foot buffers to 75 feet for streams in Clarke County. Building or paving is not allowed in buffer areas, to allow natural vegetation to filter rainwater before it runs into streams and rivers. That makes river water cleaner, and cheaper to treat for drinking downstream.
But owners of the overgrown lot adjacent to the church’s brand-new parking lot said they have already gotten the state’s permission to pipe and grade over one of the streams - which is already piped for part of its length - partly by purchasing “buffer credits” sold by the Georgia Land Trust, which uses the money to create artificial wetlands elsewhere. A representative of the landowner - known as the “Old Mill Stream” corporation - told the ACC Hearings Board Aug. 9 that the property is “a blighted eyesore right now” and he “couldn’t imagine a way” the proposed Fatz Café would have enough parking spaces if it didn’t encroach on the stream buffers. The buffer requirements make the property undevelopable, he said - even though the plan submitted doesn’t take up the entire lot, but instead leaves a large corner unbuilt for a future development.
ACC Planning Department staffers disagreed with the developer, saying the project could be redesigned “with little or no encroachment” to the other, un-piped, stream. Their recommendation to the Hearings Board was to deny the variance request for that stream. Representatives of Upper Oconee Watershed Network and Athens Grow Green Coalition argued to the board that small, wet-weather streams like the two on the property are critical to water quality. “Small headwater streams comprise 80 percent of our total stream network,” said Elizabeth Little. “Most of our county streams are already impaired from pollutants” resulting from widespread paving and inadequate past protections, she said. “We are now required by [Federal regulations] to clean up our streams.”
Citizens on the seven-member Hearings Board quickly approved a variance to pipe the remainder of the first stream underground, and then discussed whether to allow a parking lot to be built in the second stream’s buffer area. Some thought the owners had an inherent right to develop their land, and said the county’s buffer ordinance was passed with the promise that exceptions would be made when warranted. Others said the owners could design around the limitations if they chose to, and said the buffer was needed to separate the business from an adjoining residential neighborhood. In the end, the Hearings Board voted to reduce the second stream’s buffer from 75 to 50 feet to allow more parking.
John Huie jphuie@speedfactory.netIf you are having problems with the site, or have questions or suggestions, please contact us here. Thanks!
Care to comment on this article? Click here!
You will be the first person to comment on this article.