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.”

Ben Emanuel

ben@flagpole.com