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Crime, Social Services and Homeless “Dumping” in Athens-Clarke
originally published April 23, 2008
According to Athens-Clarke County (ACC) Police Chief Jack Lumpkin, “police and sheriff’s cars” from outlying counties have been bringing homeless people to Athens - and dumping them here. “They pick them up and they bring them to dump them either at the mall, downtown, Hawthorne Avenue,” Lumpkin told the Federation of Neighborhoods earlier this month. “It’s no secret that because we have services… social service agencies throughout the region encourage their clients to move to Athens,” added Associate Juvenile Court Judge Robin Shearer.
“They drop them here,” Chief Lumpkin said. “Our cameras on our building there at the mall have captured them… They’re just getting rid of, in my opinion, what they perceive as a problem.” Lumpkin said Barrow County and the city of Winder “are the two that we know of,” and he thinks there have been others. Commissioner Carl Jordan was in the audience and pressed the chief for details. “There are 10 other commissioners I think will be interested,” he said (presumably that includes the mayor). Mayor Davison recalls that she spoke with the mayor of a local city - she believes it was Winder - a year or two ago about such an incident. “The officer who dropped that person off [said] that he was instructed by the mayor… to take this individual to Athens,” Davison said. She does not recall other incidents.
“It happens in a lot of urban cities,” Lumpkin said. “Their excuse is that we have more services for the homeless… In reality, they’re just trying to get rid of the people.” Athens has had a “significant increase” in crimes committed by homeless people recently, he said.
And Chief Lumpkin said that night that he thinks the state’s juvenile justice policies are “just assuring a pipeline for future prisoners.” Young people who get involved with crime will do so again, he said, and need to be ”cooled off“ with a day or two in jail. But “the state doesn’t think that they ought to be confined for a night or a day. The state thinks that they should be turned loose.” To Judge Shearer (who must work under state guidelines), “a lot of the things that you see right now that kind of confuse people and aggravate people” - like lenient standards making it impossible to lock up juveniles for misdemeanors which are a reaction to past lawsuits over conditions that once existed in Georgia’s juvenile detention centers. But to Chief Lumpkin, “the state has just withdrawn their resources. They have no intervention for the kid, they’re not trying to help them… We’re teaching kids that there’s no consequence for wrongful behavior.”
Juveniles are “essentially driving burglaries” in Clarke County, he said, committing nearly one third of them. “Many of the kids are impoverished that are committing burglaries,” he said. Just as middle-class youths sometimes steal alcohol, or something to sell, from their own homes, young people from poor families sometimes break into other people’s homes, Lumpkin said. “They’re stealing iPods, laptops, anything they can get their hands on to sell.”
Commission Looks at Sewer Easements, Energy Plan
originally published April 23, 2008
ACC Commissioners pressed county Manager Alan Reddish last week to consider if county sewer lines might be used for public walking trails. An Eastside sewer line south of Lexington Road is “already being used as an unofficial bike trail,” Commissioner David Lynn said at the commission’s agenda-setting meeting Apr. 17. That sewer line will soon be expanded, and some commissioners think it would make a great trail - if only permission can be gained from property owners whose land it crosses. “We don’t have a road connection between Lexington Road and Barnett Shoals Road,” said Commissioner Carl Jordan. “It’d be great to have a trail connection, and then take it on down to the Greenway.”
Other commissioners agreed that sewer lines in general - and the Barnett Shoals line in particular - should be considered for recreational trails. But many landowners don’t want a public trail across their land, Reddish replied, and the county would have to get their permission, either by buying an easement or forcing them to sell. (An easement is a legal right to use another person’s land for a certain purpose.) “The kind of easements that we have do not give us permission to use these easements for anything other than sewer use,” Reddish said. “So that would mean we need to go back and negotiate different use of these easements with the property owners.” Several commissioners thought that was worth exploring, and Reddish agreed to “begin looking at the concept.”
Also at the meeting, commissioners considered an evolving plan for reducing energy consumption within the county government. A committee of interested county staffers (representing the six government departments that use the most energy) has met often to find energy savings. Every department will appoint an “energy champion” to promote conservation, and lights will be kept off in “unoccupied non-public spaces” (like offices and restrooms), the plan says. Office machines will be turned off at day’s end, and air-conditioning cannot be set below 73 degrees, nor heating above 74. “That’s going to be an interesting one - setting a standard for what thermostat settings should be in all of our buildings, and then trying to enforce that,” Central Services Director David Fluck told commissioners at the work session.
And while new county buildings will meet strict “LEED” standards for energy conservation, plans to “retro-commission” existing buildings to operate more efficiently have been placed on hold, Fluck said. That’s because the costs are too high. Also, a target 15 percent reduction in energy use (set two years ago) likely won’t be met as planned this year, he said. Just determining how much electricity the ACC government uses is proving “very labor intensive,” he said, because the government has over 280 different electricity accounts.
Specifics of the energy plan include installing more efficient light bulbs and insulation blankets on water heaters (over 50 blankets have already been installed, each saving about $90 a year). The county already uses a blend of biodiesel fuel in 224 vehicles (including most garbage trucks and all buses), and aims to substitute alternative fuels for one-tenth of the government’s fuel consumption by 2012. Although proposing some changes, Commissioner Jordan called the energy plan “an excellent strategy.” Mayor Davison said she had described Athens-Clarke’s plan at a “Greenprints” conference recently in Atlanta, and “people were pretty well impressed with what we’re doing.” The ACC plan “pretty much blew the lady from Atlanta out of the water,” Davison said.
On the Street with Kappa Alpha
originally published April 23, 2008
Ben Emanuel
No Civil War uniforms, no Confederate flag, but Kappa Alpha brothers from UGA did hold their annual Old South-themed parade last week.
For those involved, it was an historic occasion last Wednesday, Apr. 16, when members of the Kappa Alpha fraternity at UGA set out for their annual Old South-themed spring parade - the last parade setting out from the fraternity’s longtime house on Lumpkin Street just south of downtown. For a majority of passersby, it seemed, the scene of young men riding horseback in khakis, white shirts, boots and wide-brimmed hats was more of an unexplained oddity. Before the parade got underway, while horses were being saddled for upperclassmen and hay bales arranged as seating on flatbed trailers for lowerclassmen, a UGA student walking by could be heard to ask her cell phone, “What’s up with all the cowboys and horses?” There was a pause, while someone on the other end of the line responded. Then, “Huh?” On West Broad Street near the Gameday building, fraternity members astride their horses shouted “How y’all doin’?” to a group of young women, possibly high school students, standing on the sidewalk and watching the parade pass. “Heyyy,” some of the women meekly responded.
Further west on Broad, near Finley and Pope streets, a member on horseback explained, when asked, that (as reported in the news at the time) KA had not held its parade two years ago, when controversy had just broken out about its plans to move into a new house on Hancock Avenue. (That controversy was renewed early this spring when KA’s housing corporation demolished two old houses along Reese Street near the future fraternity house.) The parade was held in 2007, though, he said; that year, members wore historical “suits” rather than the traditional Confederate army uniforms. In 2008, there was no uniform or suit whatsoever, no Confederate flag, either. Although the flag was sometimes present at past parades, the men’s clothes still matched, and a lit cigar was nearly a uniform accessory.
A block further west, near Church Street, a group of mostly sophomores seated on hay bales didn’t have firm answers to questions about future parades when they’ll be living on Hancock, but when asked about this being the last parade departing from Lumpkin Street, one young man replied, “Yeah, they’re makin’ us leave.” They, of course, are UGA officials, who seek all of Lumpkin Street between Broad and Baxter for new academic buildings, a special collections library and more.
That UGA policy encouraged KA to find its own home in Athens - which it will itself own - despite the University’s later offer for a spot in a new fraternity “park” on River Road. It has now been just over two years since KA announced its intentions to buy a large parcel - formerly the Cobb Hill Apartments - in the Hancock Corridor, an historically significant African-American neighborhood that still includes homeowners as well as, in recent years, a high proportion of rental properties. (UGA’s River Road offer came to the table some months after that announcement.)
The parade’s ascent toward Milledge Avenue saw a middle-aged African-American man walking briskly on the sidewalk along with this reporter. Informed that this was the annual Old South parade, he replied, “Old rednecks, young rednecks… I just don’t believe in that flag, man, but it’s alright for them to. It’s their right.”
Whether that was a reference to past KA parades or merely to Confederate sentimentality in general was a question left unanswered, as the man continued west on Broad Street and the parade turned south onto Milledge Avenue, where sorority sisters in hoop skirts awaited. Turning north on Milledge and leaving the parade to detour just a couple of blocks past KA’s future home on the way back downtown, said reporter encountered a woman coming out of a restaurant near the Milledge/Broad intersection. She heard the hooting and hollering from across the way and said, “They sure look like they’re havin’ a good time over there, huh?”
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