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“Block Grant” Funds Moved in a Split Commission Vote
originally published April 9, 2008
Saying that housing counseling programs offered by Athens-Clarke County-funded agencies are duplicated by other similar programs, ACC Commissioners voted last week to shift $285,000 in federal “community development block grant” money to build a playground for Dudley Park and to help ACTION, Incorporated make emergency repairs for elderly homeowners instead. “I feel very strongly we need to do something different with this portion of the grant,” Commissioner Alice Kinman said at the commission’s Apr. 1 meeting. But Kinman’s proposal didn’t sit well with Commissioner George Maxwell, whose district is served by the counseling programs, and who said he was blindsided by the proposal. “If something happens in my district, at least you ought to let me know,” he complained.
But Kinman’s motion passed on a 6-4 vote, with Maxwell and Commissioners Elton Dodson, Kelly Girtz and Harry Sims dissenting. “Every penny that we use to help low-income citizens in our community must be used wisely and to the maximum,” said Commissioner Kathy Hoard, citing the work of the local anti-poverty initiative OneAthens. But a $111,000 proposal for housing counseling from Hancock Community Development Corporation (HCDC) would serve only 74 people, she said. “I see no outcome measures… if we are going to continue funding these types of programs at this level, I need to know who bought a home as a result of this, who got a job.” But Keith McNeely, director of the ACC Human and Economic Development Department, which administers the grants, told commissioners that dozens of people who attended the counseling programs provided by HCDC and the East Athens Development Corporation had purchased homes.
Commissioner Carl Jordan said he’d rather fund park improvements than contribute to “these amorphous programs that deal with human capital,” run by non-government “partners.” And while not disagreeing with those priorities, Commissioner Dodson didn’t like doing it without advance notice. “This is an entirely inappropriate way to conduct business as a government,” he said.
Questions on Wages Aired at Anti-Poverty Meeting
originally published April 9, 2008
“This is going to be something different,” Superior Court Judge and OneAthens co-chair told attendees at the large Mar. 31 public meeting of the local anti-poverty project. The event, which Jones called an “historic occasion,” came roughly two years after the initiative’s first large-scale public meetings in 2006 at Cedar Shoals High School, and a year to the month after the last large gathering at the Classic Center (also site of last week’s meeting). Despite that past timeline, Jones cast last week’s meeting more as a beginning than as a status check: “March 31st, 2008 is the day that we started reducing poverty in Athens-Clarke County,” he said at one point. And UGA Community Relations Director Pat Allen echoed several speakers, all from the initiative’s “convening” organizations, in saying “You can be assured that the initiatives you’ve heard here tonight will move forward.”
Allen also said, “You don’t build a building without first counting the costs. Each co-convenor thought carefully about this before signing on.” That was a telling remark for a UGA official to make that night, as the close of the evening saw questions raised vigorously by local living-wage activists who’ve traditionally focused much of their energy on the University in recent years. In an open-mic question period at the end of the night, Linda Lloyd of Athens’ Economic Justice Coalition received applause when she asked why a living-wage policy - included in a broad set of OneAthens recommendations a year ago - has not been incorporated into its top-tier set of initiatives.
“All of the things are good that you are saying,” Lloyd said, “but the glue that holds this thing together is wages.” She said also that she’d seen previous, similar initiatives fail for lacking a specific thrust on wage issues. But in response, Judge Jones deferred on particulars, highlighting OneAthens’ preference for stakeholder-based processes that purposely don’t privilege the goals of any single advocacy group. “The living wage has to be a part of it and we’re trying to make it a part of it,” Jones said. “Specifics - we’re not sure what it’s going to be.” Meanwhile, UGA policies in particular received defense from another co-convenor altogether, Tim Johnson of Family Connection/ Communities in Schools of Athens, who pointed out that UGA has been steadily raising wages for its lowest-paid full-time employees over the past several years.
The initiatives that have made it into OneAthens’ action plans are for the most part very specific, and they range from goals in transportation, healthcare and housing to education, teen pregnancy prevention, regional economic development and more. And though some goals - like creating a new “career academy” focused on hands-on education - have been on the books for quite some time, other ideas found clear articulation in a public setting for the first time at the meeting. For example, ACC Mayor Heidi Davison announced plans for the local government to examine its budgetary ability to begin a “phased increase” in funding for Athens Transit, as well as a goal to set aside $100,000 annually (beginning in 2009) to create a “Housing Trust Fund” similar to the county’s small-business growth fund.
Numerous other initiatives are described in depth on the OneAthens website, http://prosperousathens.org, and it seems clear that yet more action plans will continue to gain definition in the weeks and months ahead. One that was particularly fuzzy at the meeting had to do with strategies for regional economic development. Athens Area Chamber of Commerce President Doc Eldridge - who often readily admits his latecomer status to OneAthens, and did at last week’s meeting - said frankly that other, in-progress assessments on that topic would need to be completed before his committee could sink its teeth into the problem. Still, he said, the group will report its findings no later than Sept. 30 of this year.
About the OneAthens effort as a whole, Eldridge had this to say: “The greatest accomplishment in my mind has been the dialogue that it has created in the community… You cannot buy that kind of positive energy in a community.”
Water Rate System to Change in July
originally published April 9, 2008
ACC Commissioners last week passed - with minor changes - a “conservation rate structure” intended to reduce summer spikes in water demand. The new rate structure goes into effect July 1. After that, water customers who use over 25 percent more than their usual amount in any month will pay more than double for that extra water. (Each customer’s base water demand will be determined from a “winter average” of water used in the four months beginning December 2005, or - for industrial customers - the customer’s 12-month average beginning July 2005.)
Bowing to criticism from several commissioners that the new rate plan would punish the very people who conserved water during that time frame in 2005 and 2006, ACC Manager Alan Reddish suggested a 3000-gallon minimum rate - a sort of “deductible” - be applied when calculating the “winter average.” That means people who didn’t use much water during that time (or perhaps were out of town) would be given a 3000-gallon base demand rate (which might be typical of a household of a couple of people, Public Utilities Director Gary Duck told Flagpole.) That change was included in the plan.
The rate plan was OK’d by a water conservation committee of citizens and county staffers, but some local landscapers and nursery owners criticized it as detrimental to their industry. “We do support water conservation rates,” Stuart Cofer (owner of Cofer’s Home and Garden Center) told commissioners. But “this is the wrong way to make an irrigation system water-smart and efficient,” Cofer said. Encouraging homeowners to use water-saving devices like drip irrigation, pressure-reducers, or rain sensors (to turn off water when it rains) could do that, landscapers advocated. A last-minute proposal by Commissioner Carl Jordan - a consistent critic of the plan that passed - was also discussed by commissioners. Jordan’s plan would simply charge higher rates to larger water users (Oconee county uses such “block pricing”). But block pricing was rejected by the ACC water conservation committee, because larger families would pay a higher rate for water. Jordan’s plan would also have kicked up rates during summer months when river flows are lowest.
Industrial and institutional water users - like UGA and the two local poultry-processing plants, which on some days account for a quarter of the county’s total water demand - would also pay more under a block pricing plan, but committee chair Kathy Hoard said such large users already try to cut their costs by saving water. At present, industrial users pay 14 percent less than residential users for water, but those rates will be equalized in a year or two, utilities department staffers say. Some commissioners wanted more time to consider Jordan’s proposal, but Commissioner Hoard pointed out that commissioners have been considering conservation rates since 2003. “We had numerous meetings, and the end result was, nobody was happy with any plan,” she said. Besides, Manager Reddish pointed out, the county needs additional revenue soon to cover expansion of sewage treatment plants (and that money comes from water bills).
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