Athens Through The Seasons

Or, 2006: Flagpole’s Year in Civic Life

originally published December 27, 2006

Winter

The very outset of 2006 saw a group of local leaders announce the intention to set up a comprehensive program to find ways to alleviate persistent poverty in Athens. In late March, more than 700 people turned out at Cedar Shoals High School for the public kick-off of Partners for a Prosperous Athens (PPA). By summertime, the organizers found they had to face the fact that the people whom they most needed to bring into the poverty discussion - those at the low end of the income scale - weren't turning out to meetings. They started holding “community conversations” with groups all over town that have a stake in working on the problem of poverty. Those conversations were still taking place at year’s end, and the plan is to hold even more of them in the first few months of 2007, which will also see the PPA steering committee winnowing down an impressive list of recommendations from the citizens who’ve been meeting monthly since last March.

Winter brought plenty of bad news for Athens-area agencies that help the homeless, and in January both the Athens Area Homeless Shelter and the Homeless Day Service Center were still in dire straits financially. Both recovered from that situation - local musicians did their part for the shelter with a night of Rolling Stones covers at the 40 Watt, and many citizens chipped in, too - and their doors stayed open throughout the year.

Early in the year, a handful of locals and a goodly number of our neighbors in the mountains were getting pretty worked up about plans to build a new interstate - to be called I-3 - coming from Savannah up through eastern Georgia and blasting through the Blue Ridge on its way to Knoxville. Rumbles about that awful idea eventually quieted down while the concept trucked its way through the federal bureaucracy…  but a plan that bad never quite goes away, does it?

Marxist postmodernist scholar Fredric Jameson paid Athens a visit in February, and the Revolution still didn't start. (The academics said that wasn't the point, but whatever.)

A mayor-appointed TDRs (Transferable Development Rights) study committee got started in December of ’05 and met regularly throughout 2006, but didn't come up with anything firm. The committee was charged with figuring out if TDRs could even work here, the goal being primarily to preserve open space in the greenbelt at the county’s edges.

The Athens-Clarke County (ACC) Commission’s January meeting was quick and easy, but it was perhaps only a warm-up for things to come. A long February night at City Hall saw commissioners finally approve - with the oddest couple, Elton Dodson and States McCarter, casting the two dissenting votes - plans for the controversial La Puerta del Sol restaurant on Cedar Shoals Drive. Speaking of which, as of December, restaurateur Bruno Rubio was still only operating a restaurant on Lumpkin Street, but all indications are that he plans to make his Eastside concept a reality some time in 2007. Maybe by then some of the neighbors will forget how angry they were over it.

The same night as the La Puerta vote, ACC Commissioners passed a six-month moratorium on building fraternity houses anywhere in the county, angering more than one group who happened to be planning to do just that. Earlier that day, Kappa Alpha applied for permits to build a house at its recently-acquired West Hancock Avenue location, thereby escaping the restrictions of the moratorium. KA did not escape hearing (in no uncertain terms) the feelings of their future neighbors in the Hancock Corridor; at an intense March meeting in the sanctuary of Hill First Baptist Church, they received what amounts to a moving sermon (but not moving enough to make them change their minds).

Other fraternities - some without houses currently, and some with long-standing houses along Lumpkin Street where UGA plans to expand the campus proper - were not so lucky, and at year’s end, the University found itself still negotiating with a few who want better terms in a deal for homes on River Road. Sigma Nu, whose purchase of a Cobbham building started off the whole spat, hadn't indicated its plans one way or another (though a handful of guys had been living in that building since summer). And along Hancock Avenue, residents are begrudgingly getting closer to the day when they’ll have some new neighbors.

Also on that February night at City Hall (according to the blotter in the trusty Athens Banner-Herald), it seems someone went upstairs to urinate and defecate in a third-floor closet. Local politics sure brings out the best in people.

Additionally in February (it must have been an optimistic month), commissioners said they wanted the government to get back on the stick with “traffic-calming” measures like speed humps. Neighborhood residents were concerned, scared and frustrated with the traffic. Many vented on the topic at a public meeting in late May. County staff and commissioners looked at the citizen concerns, and looked at the budget. They looked at the high price tags on speed humps and other asphalt-related projects. And, in a bold move in September, commissioners postponed making any decision on traffic-calming. As far as 2006 was concerned, that difficult issue didn't come up again.

In a bad example of soap-opera style, back-and-forth governance over streetscape and safety improvements on Baxter Street, ACC Commissioners and the Manager’s office showed that a small group of vocal businesspeople can still have their way on policy despite solid evidence and arguments pointing in a different direction. The long and short of it: no more medians to help keep traffic safely under control toward the Alps end of Baxter. Oh, well. Concrete just keeps getting more expensive anyway.

Spring

In March, Flagpole’s City Pages ran a story trying to explain why it has taken so long for the state to pass judgment on CertainTeed’s application to expand operations - and emissions - at its Athens plant. The thinking at that point was that the permit would likely be approved shortly thereafter. That never happened, but you can bet that you’ll hear about it when it does. In other words, 2006 proved to be a quieter year locally in terms of air quality issues than the year before; but the air pollution is definitely still here, and so are the people who are well-organized against it.

Also that month, UGA formed a committee of faculty, staff and administrators to study the wages of the lowest-paid workers on campus. Working in parallel to similarly-directed efforts through Partners for a Prosperous Athens, the committee was still at work as the year drew to a close; keep an eye out for more news on this topic.

A downtown drama played out on Flagpole’s Letters page in March when a bartender had his car window smashed late one night. The good news? The culprit fessed up, and paid up, too. Leif, the victim of the crime, wrote on the Letters page a few weeks later: “There is still hope in this crazy, mixed-up world.” Right on.

Also in March, commissioners voted to go ahead with a four-lane design for a new road - the Jennings Mill Parkway - roughly parallel to Atlanta Highway west of the Loop. There was disagreement about the plan - some commissioners simply wanted to help revive dead shopping centers with empty big-box stores, and others were troubled about spending almost all of the year’s road-building monies in one place - but in the end the many cries for relief from small-business owners with lots of big trucks in the area won out. (Later, when it came time to draw up a new fiscal year’s budget, commissioners allocated some accumulated interest money to yet-to-be-determined alternative transportation projects, making themselves and others feel better about spending all that dough on the Jennings Mill Parkway.)

Commissioners also declined to go out on a limb and build a roundabout where Old Lexington Road branches off of Barnett Shoals Road on the Eastside, although some residents there were pushing for creative solutions to road design as their neighborhoods grow. The ACC transportation department presented a rough draft of some ideas in October, and Eastsider Tom Hurst (at bshoalscharrette@bellsouth.net) put out a call for Barnett Shoals Road area residents to participate in a process like the recent “Community Approach to Planning Prince Avenue,” or CAPPA. So let’s see, that’d be CAPBSR? Acronyms aside, here’s hoping 2007 sees the fruits of the community’s efforts out there.

Early in April, we started dialing 10 digits just to make local calls here. Most folks with cell phones barely noticed, and the rest of us quickly got used to the new ritual (even those of us who can’t remember 10 digits at once). Such are the momentous changes of these times.

In April, the local environmentalists and smart-growth advocates of the Athens Grow Green Coalition brought a visitor to town who had some things to tell us about the links to be made between the new citizen-centered effort to work on our poverty problem (Partners for a Prosperous Athens), and Athens’ abiding concern to keep growth and development from ruining the city. William Johnson had some good stories to tell about his experiences seeing the city of Rochester, NY through a process of remarkable civic change.

Just before the spring semester ended, UGA finally said it would provide “soft benefits” to the domestic partners of employees, and also extended the campus anti-discrimination policy to cover sexual orientation. Athens-Clarke County made a similar amendment to its anti-discrimination policy several weeks later. Half the year later, at their December meeting, ACC Commissioners on a narrow vote decided to provide full health benefits to the domestic partners of the local government’s employees.

Also memorable: Late on the afternoon of May 1, an incredible crowd of thousands filled the streets of downtown Athens chanting slogans like “Si, se puede!” and making a loud and clear statement for the decent treatment of Latino immigrants.

Summer

As the year’s county budget-writing process came to a close, Mayor Davison all of a sudden found herself with an extra quarter-million dollars to put somewhere. It went toward providing bus service until 11 p.m. on several Athens Transit routes. The change took effect in August, at the same time that The Bus moved into the shiny new Multi-Modal Transportation Center on the eastern edge of downtown. It was a pretty big year for The Bus.

In June, commissioners approved the continued presence of 13 fiberglass bulldogs on city property. There was barely a bark from the citizenry, many of whom often claim to be offended by the kitschy dogs. Such is life in Athens.

Also in midsummer, when the weather got hot and dry and all the creeks and rivers ran low, some Athens-based activists tried to convince the state to hold a town hall meeting here about the in-progress statewide water plan. Their push didn't work, but that important planning process goes on. Not only that, but we were told at the time to expect another round of public meetings in January, 2007. So get your sense of civic responsibility and environmental stewardship ready!

Flagpole’s Letters pages played host to a spirited public debate over the merits and aesthetic qualities of Missy Kulik’s “Tofu Baby” comic strip series. In the end, even with all the back-and-forths and the nasty things that got said, the dialogue proved one thing: that our readers are most certainly capable of having an honest, open discussion about the pressing issues of the day. Kudos.

Early in August, ACC Commissioners concluded a three-year process of public meetings and feedback-gathering with a vote to make part of downtown a local historic district, requiring review on any façade changes there. A handful of downtown business and property owners went down to City Hall that night to fuss about what they saw as more needless government restriction, but commissioners were unswayed by their last-minute hollering on the topic.

In August, the city of Watkinsville came back to the future and voted to allow beer and wine sales in restaurants. Perhaps that little town’s getting with the program was just a prelude to Athens getting back to our program (drinking!) upon the return of the students and football season. Here, there was the typical discussion, augmented by electioneering, of what to do about all the kids and all their drinking. There was even discussion - welcomed by some bar owners - of holding doormen liable for underage service or putting scannable bar codes on drivers’ licenses, but both ideas fizzled without going anywhere.

Fall

In September, local officials dipped their toes into the waters of discussing where Athens’ garbage will go when the present landfill is full. (That’ll be in only six to eight years, they say. Oh, wait a minute… did you just throw out all that Christmas wrapping paper? Make that five years.) The discussion didn't go very far, except to inform some residents near the landfill that the dump currently in their backyards may get even bigger. That, or maybe we can up our recycling rates, and keep all that gift wrap out of the dump completely? Nah.

September also saw downtown business owners let off some steam at a meeting on the topic of panhandling. But their doomsday forecasts of downtown being overrun by vagrants went away when the panhandling itself quieted down considerably. Police reported that all it took was a few arrests on “aggressive panhandling” charges, and then word spread fast through that vilified (and perhaps a little terrified) community. By October, the appeased and pleased merchants reported that the problem seemed to have gone away almost entirely.

The Boulevard neighborhood got itself into a couple of thorny planning problems that cropped up throughout the year: one when some of its own proposed a small restaurant for an old church building at the corner of Boulevard and Chase Street, and one when Emmanuel Episcopal Church applied to move a couple of old houses off church property to new locations in the neighborhood. Opposed by preservationists (including members of its own congregation), Emmanuel had its application denied by the ACC Historic Preservation Commission; on appeal in the fall, that decision was upheld by the Planning Commission and the ACC Mayor and Commission. As far as Flagpole knows, the issue of the historic Episcopal cottages hasn’t made its way to the courtroom yet, but it may be something to look out for in the new year. Meanwhile, over on Chase Street, a lot of discussion brought folks closer to eye-to-eye, but nothing seemed to have happened on the ground yet.

The autumn also saw ideas start to take shape for the future of the Navy Supply Corps School property in Normaltown. Area non-profits submitted Notices of Interest that described what they’d do to help folks out if given a little bit of the land there; the local government said building a tournament-ready tennis complex would be nice, and UGA said it wants the whole thing for a new health sciences campus, period. Then, in late November, the crew of top-drawer consultants working on the plans came back to town to show Athens what they’re working on, which is based on what they heard in public comment sessions earlier in the year. Next, private developers will take a crack at laying out some ideas for the base, and 2007 will be a busy year for the Local Redevelopment Authority charged with developing a sensible re-use plan that may or may not please everyone.

Ben Emanuel

ben@flagpole.com