Local Politicos Look Ahead to an Election Season

originally published March 12, 2008

Up for re-election this year are half of Athens-Clarke County’s 10 county commissioners - if they decide to run. District 8 Commissioner Andy Herod (presently serving out the unfinished term of States McCarter, who resigned in early 2007) will run again, he says, so will Commissioner Alice Kinman in District 4. "My constituents have cheerfully put up with me during my steep climb up the learning curve,” Kinman says. “I think I now owe them at least one term of 'experienced’ representation.”

District 6 Commissioner Carl Jordan - who once said he wouldn’t run again - told Flagpole last week that he’s in, too. (“Why wouldn’t I? I’m doing a good job, aren’t I?”) And Jordan may have an opponent in local business consultant Red Petrovs. "I’m just weighing it at this point,” Petrovs says. A co-chair of the OneAthens anti-poverty initiative, Petrovs wants to see someone on the Commission who’s deeply committed to that group’s recommendations. And neither super-Commissioner Elton Dodson nor District 2’s Harry Sims (the Commission’s longest-serving member, since 1993) have decided about running again, they say.

And since Mayor Heidi Davison can’t run for a third four-year term as Mayor, that race will be wide open - not this year, but in 2010. Charlie Maddox ran against Heidi last time, and says he will run again for mayor next time. Just retired from 34 years at the Georgia Department of Labor, Maddox puts economic and educational concerns above quality-of-life issues. “What fights poverty is jobs,” he says. “I don’t care what the quality of life is, if somebody has not a job.” At one time, young Athenians could count on finding industrial jobs that paid well, Maddox says. “All of those jobs are gone, but we’ve got to get some things back like that - so people that are not going to college, that are not going to UGA… can go and get those kinds of jobs and raise their family.” To Maddox, “Athens is a very desirable place” that can sell itself better to industry than it is currently. And he believes local government can become “partners in education” to encourage young people to stay in school and expand their horizons.

Also rumored to be interested in the Mayor’s job: ACC Police Chief Jack Lumpkin, who grew up in Athens. Asked last week, Lumpkin neither confirmed nor denied that he is interested.

John Huie

jphuie@athens.net

Demolition Doesn’t Win Kappa Alpha Any New Friends

originally published March 12, 2008

The demolition on Feb. 29 of two century-old houses on Reese Street by Gamma Partners, LLC - the corporation that owns the future home of the Kappa Alpha fraternity chapter at UGA, one of a handful of fraternities losing its current home on Lumpkin Street to campus development plans - didn’t necessarily come as much of a surprise to some neighborhood residents who’ve now had two years to get used to (or not) the idea of having KA for a neighbor. On the other hand, the bulldozer’s presence that Friday came as a rude shock to some of the people working to protect what’s left of the Reese Street-Hancock Avenue neighborhood.

Amy Kissane, for example, as director of the Athens-Clarke Heritage Foundation (or ACHF), has been working with residents toward designating part of the neighborhood as a local historic district. That push toward protecting and stabilizing the neighborhood has been largely a response to the incursion of KA’s new fraternity house in its midst, but Kissane says that in recent months she’d been optimistic about the fraternity’s participation in the designation effort - in part because a representative, John Jones, had been attending regular neighborhood meetings about the upcoming designation push.

“They were coming to the meetings,” Kissane says. “Everything seemed like it was headed in the right direction. I felt comfortable.”

That was until it became apparent the last week in February that Gamma Partners was considering demolishing the two houses on Reese Street. The group had bought the neighboring houses (one was on the corner, fronting Church Street) from rental-property magnate Richard Hathaway not long after it purchased the Cobb Hill Apartments in late 2005. Owning those three parcels gave them control of almost the entire square block between Church, Reese and Harris streets and Hancock Avenue. The exception was, and is, an owner-occupied house on Church Street, owned by the family of neighborhood activist Hope Iglehart.

Iglehart has been working closely with Kissane to spearhead the historic-district designation effort. When she noticed in January that the two houses’ tenants had moved out, she checked with city officials to learn if Gamma Partners had pulled a demolition permit. It hadn’t, and because demolition permits in general aren’t covered under Athens-Clarke County’s Neighborhood Notification Initiative, it would be difficult to keep track of the fraternity’s plans.

Alternatives in Play

As it turned out, Gamma Partners received demolition permits in mid-February. As the month neared its close, Kissane and current ACHF board President David Kidd met repeatedly with Jones and Gamma Partners agent Mark Cross to discuss options that would enable the two houses to remain standing. Among them was the possibility of donating the houses to ACHF - an admittedly outside-the-box idea, Kissane admits, but one that would have fit in with KA’s attempts to show its neighborliness in the time since it first announced its move to the area. (An example: KA has donated furnishings from two of the now-demolished apartment buildings it bought to Habitat for Humanity.) In the wake of the demolition, though, much of that hoped-for goodwill has quickly dissipated.

The complexity of Gamma Partners’ plans for the block, especially as they relate to ACC regulations, appears to have precluded the kinds of creative solutions Kissane and Kidd were working for. Several weeks ago, Gamma submitted a plat to ACC Planning staff to recombine its three lots on the block. (One lot held the two remaining apartment buildings and the under-construction Antebellum-style fraternity house fronting Hancock Avenue; the other two lots held the now-demolished houses.) Now, there are two lots total: one holding just the new fraternity house (and a smaller separate building with meeting space), and the other holding the two apartment buildings and the two former Reese Street lots. According to Cross, Gamma Partners will retain ownership of the latter lot as a “standalone investment,” but lease it to property-management firm Parker & Associates, which owned the Cobb Hill Apartments until Gamma bought them. The intention as of now is to keep the former house sites as greenspace, Cross says, though Gamma may ask ACC officials for “a couple” of parking spaces there. The other lot, containing the new fraternity house, will be transferred from Gamma to the KA housing corporation for members to move in this fall.

A Regulatory Nightmare?

Tied up in the recombination and demolition is the corporation’s need to meet Athens-Clarke County density and zoning requirements and, Cross says, to do so under a changing regulatory system. After KA and Sigma Nu announced intentions to move into the same neighborhood in early 2006, ACC Commissioners instituted a moratorium on Greek house construction, which later that year morphed into a new “special use” zoning category for Greek houses. If not for that changing legal landscape, Cross says, “We would have configured the lot and our buildings entirely differently.” In other words, he says, “Our plans have evolved as the rules have changed.”

The group’s original development proposal involved removing eight bedrooms from the apartment buildings, in order to increase the allowable density in the new fraternity house to 20 bedrooms. The lot recombination meant that, in order to regain seven of the eight bedrooms in the apartment buildings without going over allowable density, the two houses would be knocked down. Cross explored donating the houses to an entity like Habitat for Humanity, and also looked into moving them to a property he owns in Madison County. In part because of their relatively poor condition, Cross says (the roof was falling in on one, and the electrical wiring was done backwards in another), those options didn’t play out. “It just didn’t make economic sense. They were past their useful life.”

One way to save the houses would have been to ask ACC officials for an exception to density and zoning requirements, which would have required a rezoning or perhaps a “planned development” designation. Going to the Mayor and Commission with such a request was “a long shot,” Cross says.

Flagpole has not assessed the entire Commission’s feeling on that point. Would they have been amenable to an up-zoning if meant saving the houses? “I think that’s more likely than not,” says Commissioner Kelly Girtz. "It’s not like it would’ve been a shoo-in, but of course we didn’t have time to explore the option, and that’s the real disappointment.” Kissane, who realizes Gamma may have been skeptical about catching any breaks from ACC officials, is also herself skeptical about the level of consideration they gave her proposal in particular (though Cross had explored other options somewhat earlier). “I have to question the ability to fully vet something like that in 48 hours,” she says.

The Neighborhood’s Future

“It really is a devastating blow to the neighborhood,” Kissane says. The demolition is devastating in particular to the ongoing effort to designate Reese Street and the surrounding area as a local historic district. The two houses would have been two of about 50 “contributing structures” to the district. A draft report on designating the district is in the hands of the ACC Historic Preservation Commission, and is available online through the heritage foundation at www.achfonline.org. Kissane and Iglehart told neighborhood residents, and their allies from Cobbham and Bloomfield, at a meeting Mar. 5, that they hope for an ACC Commission vote to designate the district as early as July. The new district will be unique among local historic districts, not only in being historically an African-American area, but also in having a very high proportion of student-geared rental properties within its bounds. Because historic designation tends to increase property values, there would seem to be some possibility that it could increase the rate of gentrification in the neighborhood. It will also, though, stabilize development in the area and likely prevent future changes on the scale of KA’s project.

At that somber meeting Mar. 5, neighborhood residents and preservationists seemed to agree that any measure of trust Kappa Alpha had begun to build up in the neighborhood had been broken. They tried to look forward to historic-district designation while lamenting both recent events and the not-so-recent history of the neighborhood, like its 15-year relationship with Richard Hathaway, who, in addition to UGA Professor Maurice Daniels, owns most of the area’s rental properties.

Residents and advocates also wondered aloud about what’s in store for the neighborhood once KA fraternity brothers - who are distinct from Gamma Partners LLC, some took pains to point out - move in this August. The Old South-minded fraternity has indicated that it plans to try to be respectful as it moves into the historically African-American neighborhood. Residents there, though, have worried all along about strained relations once fraternity members move in. At last week’s meeting, they were not optimistic.

Ben Emanuel

ben@flagpole.com

Athens-Clarke County Modifies Outdoor Water Use Restrictions

Full Text of the Athens-Clarke County Press Release

Effective March 16, 2008

originally published March 12, 2008

Athens-Clarke County Mayor Heidi Davison has signed an order modifying local outdoor water use restrictions to include exemptions recently authorized under the State Level 4 Drought Response and the Upper Oconee Basin Water Authority’s recent actions. Athens-Clarke County residents now have the opportunity to maintain swimming pools and to water landscaping under specific guidelines. Unified Government staff concluded that the exemptions would still allow Athens-Clarke County to meet the average day water use volumes allowed by Environmental Protection Division (EPD) requirements.

Section I. Allowed Outdoor Water Use - No permit required

Swimming Pools:

• Swimming pools may be topped off and maintained as necessary. Filling and/or refilling of swimming pools will require a Special Use Permit - please see Section II below.

Existing Landscapes:

• Hand-watering of existing landscapes, defined as one person with one garden hose with a spray nozzle attached, will be allowed 25 minutes per day, during designated hours on an odd/even watering schedule.

• The hose must be hand-held during watering and equipped with a standard spray nozzle that automatically turns off when released.

• Watering is allowed only from 12:00 midnight to 10:00 a.m.

• Odd-numbered addresses may water on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays.

• Even-numbered addresses may water on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays.

• No outdoor watering is allowed on Fridays.

Food Gardens:

• Watering of personal food gardens is allowed only within the restrictions set forth above.

Pressure Washing

• Pressure washing will be allowed for health and/or safety reasons.

• Pressure washing for other purposes will require a Special Use Permit - please see Section II below.

Section II. Allowed Outdoor Water Use - Special Use Permit required

The uses below will be allowed under the outdoor water use modifications with permits required. Permits for these uses will be issued until a water demand threshold of 100,000 gallons per day is met; once permits totaling 100,000 gallons per day have been issued, no more permits will be allowed for that specific day. The uses listed below will require a Special Use Permit from the Athens-Clarke County Public Utilities Department. The permit application will require a description of the gallons-per-day demand necessary before the permit will be issued.

Special Use Permits are available from the Athens-Clarke County Public Utilities Department located at 1865 W. Broad Street, Suite C (706-613-3470).

Swimming Pools:

• The filling or refilling of swimming pools will only be allowed after obtaining a Special Use Permit. The number of gallons necessary for filling/refilling of the pool will be required before a permit is issued.

Newly installed landscaping:

• Landscaping newly installed by a professionally certified or licensed landscaper only, may be watered by any method for a period of 10 weeks following installation. Proof of a landscaper's certification or business licensing is required. Watering will be allowed only between 12:00 midnight and 10:00 a.m. based on the odd/even watering schedule below.

• Odd-numbered addresses may water on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays.

• Even-numbered addresses may water on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays.

• No outdoor watering is allowed on Fridays.

• Only professionally installed landscaping is eligible for this 10-week exemption.

Pressure Washing:

• Pressure washing prior to a procedure such as painting can only be performed by a licensed professional.

• Pressure washing for aesthetic or beautification purposes is prohibited.

Other Allowed Outdoor Water Uses requiring Special Use Permits:

• Watering in of pesticides/herbicides/fertilizers by a licensed professional only is allowed.

• Flushing of water lines for new developments is allowed.

• Water uses related to roadway construction are allowed.

All other outdoor water uses remain prohibited, including washing vehicles (except in a commercial car wash that has obtained a Special Use Permit).

The modifications to outdoor water use are subject to change based on available water supply and reduction mandates in monthly usage set forth by the Governor and Georgia Environmental Protection Division.

These modifications apply to all residential, commercial, governmental, and institutional customers of the Athens-Clarke County public water supply system. Private water supplies such as wells are currently exempt from the outdoor water use restrictions, but conservation is encouraged. Groundwater supplies have also been impacted by the drought.

The Athens-Clarke County Public Utilities Department urges citizens to follow all outdoor water use restrictions and conserve water indoors whenever possible. Authorized Athens-Clarke County personnel will be enforcing the restrictions, with surcharges of $1000.00 and/or termination of water service for violating the outdoor water use restrictions.

Please call 706-613-3470, visit the Athens-Clarke County Public Utilities Department located at 1865 W. Broad Street, Suite C, or visit www.accpublicutilities.com for additional information.

Remember to Think at the Sink about all water use and visit www.thinkatthesink.com for additional water conservation information.