News & Views You Can Use
Water Restrictions Eased
New Rates On the Way
originally published March 19, 2008
Water-use restrictions were loosened in Athens-Clarke County last week, with “hand watering” of plants or lawns now permitted for 25 minutes a day, up to three days a week. (For odd-numbered addresses, that’s Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays; even numbers get the other days - except Fridays, when no watering is allowed. Citizens must use a hose with a spray nozzle that cuts itself off, and finish watering by 10 a.m.) Meanwhile, a new “conservation rate structure” for county water bills is expected to go into effect July 1. After that, water users who use more water in some months than in others will be charged a higher rate for the extra water they use.
ACC Commissioners raised a few questions about the water rates at their work session Mar. 11, but seemed to have no real objections to the staff-recommended plan. (Commissioner Carl Jordan has pressed for a plan with rates that would vary according to how much water is available in the rivers, but ACC Deputy Manager Bob Snipes said at a recent meeting on the topic that customers need some “predictability” in rates.) The current plan was approved by the citizens’ committee on water conservation, many of whom attended last week’s session. Public Utilities Director Gary Duck defended the proposal as “the fairest initial process that we could set up” because it doesn’t penalize large families who use more water. Instead, explained Snipes, the new billing plan tries to even out citizens’ month-to-month water demands, reducing the summertime “spikes” when water use is highest.
“We’re all paying the costs for the summertime use - even if we’re not using it,” said Commissioner Alice Kinman. Customers who use more water in the summer months are getting something of a “free ride,” staffers say, because the county has to build an expensive infrastructure just to provide that extra margin of water availability. Of course, all water requires infrastructure - but summer users aren’t paying for it year-round, as are customers who use the same amount every month, Snipes told commissioners. The new rates are not intended to raise more revenue, and some users’ bills could actually go down. But customers who use more than 25 percent more water (as compared to an average based on their past usage) will be charged two-and-a-half times as much for the extra water. The formula is somewhat complicated, and the ACC Public Information Office and utilities department personnel are gearing up to explain it to an anticipated-to-be bewildered public.
“La Puerta del Sol”
Two Years Later
originally published March 19, 2008
February marked two years - believe it or not - since the ACC Commission granted a rezone request for the surprisingly controversial La Puerta del Sol restaurant and mixed-use development planned for the former Cofer’s Home and Garden Center store on Cedar Shoals Drive. The rezone granted a “Planned Development” designation, creating a binding site plan for local restaurateur Bruno Rubio’s ambitious designs. Now, 24 months having passed without any construction having taken place, an automatic sunset clause built in to all Planned Development rezonings has kicked in to make the special zoning designation obsolete unless it’s renewed.
Rubio has, however, applied for an extension to the zoning designation, says Ken Beall, whose firm (Beall & Co.) is helping design the project. “Everyone - and I say this not in a negative fashion - thinks that it’s easier to do development and faster to do development than it actually is,” he says. And, Beall says, he and Rubio aren’t particularly worried about getting approval from the ACC Planning Commission to continue, when feasible, with the project as planned.
“The fact that he [Rubio] hasn’t done it has nothing to do with any diminished desire on his part,” Beall says. Rather, he says, it has to do with a series of “unfortunate” circumstances that required other projects of Rubio’s to be completed first. (Those had partly to do with closing down his two then-existing restaurants, Azucaa on Tallassee Road and Pollo Criollo on Prince Avenue in Normaltown. Rubio’s lending banks, more or less, wanted him to get something open and operating in short order - hence the need to open up shop on Lumpkin Street - currently home to Cali ’n’ Tito’s - and put other projects, particularly La Puerta del Sol, on the back burner.) That’s why Rubio has been operating solely out of his Lumpkin Street location; he’s also just recently begun construction on a parcel he’s owned for some time - a lot containing several small brick buildings on Jefferson Road. Among other hang-ups, the bureaucratic behemoth that is the Georgia Department of Transportation came into play at that location, thanks to right-of-way issues along the state highway there. (And the Lumpkin Street location, once said to be the future home of new apartments? “We are going to stay on Lumpkin,” Rubio says. “We’re not sure how long, but it’ll probably be another year or two.”)
And the ball is in motion on the eastside location, though the property itself doesn’t show any progress yet. “He has met with and had lengthy discussions with a number of contractors,” Beall says. The project to build La Puerta del Sol is, after all, a complex one. It is planned in two phases: the first to simply make modifications to the existing building and begin operating there. Only in the second phase - once he’s open, in true ever-evolving Rubio style - does he plan to build two new buildings which would house retail space and apartments (for employees and for chefs and musicians visiting from abroad), creating an open-air courtyard for fine dining in the center of the development.
“I think it’s still reasonable to assume that that’s [Cedar Shoals Drive] a good location for the project that Bruno contemplated and envisioned,” Beall says. As for the nuts and bolts for the time being, the rezoning question is on the ACC Planning Commission’s agenda for its next meeting on April 3. Needless to say, Rubio and his partners in the effort are as optimistic as they have ever been. Says Beall, “The dream is still as alive as ever.”
Gov’t Sets Out to Solve Local Trash Problems
originally published March 19, 2008
If the headlining, local-government, natural-resource issue of the past several months has been the record-breaking drought, the biggest sideliner has been Athens’ growing pile of trash. ACC Commissioners voted in January to expand the local landfill (which straddles the line with Oglethorpe County), but not without complaints from some commissioners that efforts to reduce the local “waste stream” (already in progress) ought to be brought forward first. The official presentation of a complete suite of such strategies finally came to commissioners at their work session March 11, and ACC recycling coordinator Suki Janssen says all the ideas on the table got a warm reception from elected officials.
The ongoing solid waste discussion of the past several months has taken as one of its running themes the fact that Athens’ curbside residential recycling program - now almost 20 years old, and groundbreaking in the state when it began - has long since reached a plateau and, in terms of further improvements, become stagnant. The main cause? As a legacy of city-county unification in the early 1990s, trash pickup in the “general service district” - the former county jurisdiction, outside the old city limits - is left to private franchised haulers over which the ACC government has “minimal control,” in the words of ACC Solid Waste Department Director Jim Corley. Although all of the private trash-haulers with county contracts do have to offer recycling (“and they do, at various levels,” Corley says), they’re also competing against each other for profits - unlike his department, which provides curbside recycling pickup in the “urban service district,” i.e. the former Athens city Athens limits. “Recycling costs money,” Corley says, “…so they don’t push it as hard.”
For example, while the “pay-as-you-throw” system in the urban service district increases residents’ fees by five-dollar increments as the size of their trash can goes up, most private haulers only increase those fees (intended as encouragement to recycle more of one’s trash) by one-dollar increments - providing too little inducement to reduce trash volumes and, therefore, trash can size. Largely for those reasons, one of many strategies suggested to commissioners by Corley and Janssen is to divide the whole of Athens-Clarke into zones and bid out exclusive franchise contracts - with more government control over how those contracts will be carried out. This is one idea they’d pitched to commissioners as a secondary strategy, aiming to carry it out within five years; commissioners, though, expressed interest in seeing it happen sooner, and upgraded the tactic to the current list of primary waste-reduction strategies. Also included in that set of strategies: increasing the “tipping fee” paid by haulers at the landfill (to get it on par with nearby landfills), providing curbside pickup of compost, and creating a “center for hard-to-recycle materials” (possibly at the former trash incinerator site on College Avenue near the North Oconee River). Reforming the county’s relationship with private haulers, Corley points out, won’t come easily. “Some of them are concerned, and rightly so,” he says. But no specific decisions have been made yet. “We definitely intend to invite the haulers in and have them be a part of the discussion,” he says.
Overall, the scope of the proposed waste-reduction plan (see www.acc-recycle.org) is ambitious and impressive; although commissioners and staff admit that a “zero waste” community is not a reasonable expectation at present, the ever-more-popular “zero waste” mindset is what they intend to adopt. Not unlike the way last fall’s water shortage brought water supply issues to the forefront of the public consciousness, the nearly-filled local landfill - and the decision to expand its property - has made the time right for officials to get aggressive in reducing solid waste. Says Corley, “If the landfill had had 50 years of capacity, some of this might never have come up.”
One other unlikely area of convergence between drought issues and garbage issues: while conservation-minded citizens are to be commended for replacing their old-fashioned toilets with newer low-flow models, they should know that old toilets are not recyclable, and therefore should never be left at county recycling drop-off bins. “In the last few months,” Janssen says, “I have had to send our guys out for toilets at our drop-off sites more than I have in the three years I’ve been working here.”
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