Commish Business: The weather has warmed, the humidity has arrived, the farmers’ market is under way… the town has entered quiet time, but you wouldn’t know it if you were on the ACC Commission. This month finds that group charging forward from a pretty interesting May voting meeting into its budget work, with some long budget sessions this month and a vote on the annual budget coming up at the June voting meeting. But also on the table for another month is the matter of raising bus fares - which ones and how much - which commissioners did not put to bed last week. There does appear to be consensus that they don’t want to cut back on service, which is not a surprise, but some commissioners also seem intrigued by the alternative farebox proposal coming at them from a local guy named Michael Smith. Even having tabled the Transit issue for a month, commissioners probably don’t have time for the kind of fundamental analysis that would compare Smith’s ideas to staff’s, but some of them are receptive to elements like not charging for young children or for transfers - they’ve just got to find a way to pay for them.

Examples keep presenting themselves, all over town, of the needed tree ordinance tweaking that’s to come this year.

Tree Talk: A while back it was the new CVS store site on Hawthorne Avenue at the corner of Oglethorpe; this time it’s the new office building site on Prince Avenue between Pound and Sylvia streets that has locals scratching their heads and asking, “Don’t we have a tree ordinance?” The answer is yes, but in addition to our tree ordinance not necessarily jiving perfectly with other parts of the zoning code - and after all, when an office building replaces some small houses on a busy street, the site’s going to change - there are also some goofy give-and-takes within the tree ordinance itself. At the CVS, all the trees conserved (and yes, the project met code) are at the back of the lot; on Prince, a “landmark tree” in back gave local businessman Todd Emily extra canopy “credits,” allowing the cutting of more trees elsewhere. But the Community Tree Council is beginning to look at all these issues, and ACC Commissioner Mike Hamby says his Legislative Review Committee will delve into the tree ordinance this year, probably starting next month. It’ll take a few meetings to sort through it all, though, Hamby wisely warns.

Correction: Last week’s City Pages article on green building standards quoted ACC Environmental Coordinator Dick Field as saying, “The mayor wants [standards for private builders] in place within a couple of months.”  And she does, too,  but Field was referring to Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, not Athens’ Heidi Davison. We’ll try to listen more closely next time. [John Huie]

And Another: City Dope erred last week in typing up a last-minute column addition about the May 5 official announcement of the Charlie Maddox campaign for mayor. “Along with Tax Commissioner Nancy Denson, that makes two declared candidates in the race,” the note said. In his haste, City Dope was forgetting about candidate number three (or is it number one or two, chronologically speaking?), Brandon Shinholser, the 22-year-old liberal progressive who’s been officially in the race for well over a year now. Presumably we’ll all learn more about Shinholser’s campaign in the months to come, but for the time being, it’s safe to say he’s nothing if not ambitious.

Which Brings Us To: Charlie Maddox. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, Maddox’s announcement - due to the make-up of the attendants - morphed on the spot into a friendly face-to-face conversation over coffee between City Dope, the Banner-Herald’s Blake Aued, Maddox and his right-hand man Jeff Snowden. In a nutshell, Maddox said the campaign heard the criticism that he was not specific enough on issues in the ’06 race. He’s working to remedy that, he said; at present, however, his platform planks - which focus on economic development - are largely the same as last time. The question, then, is whether he’ll firm up the pitch. Oh, and hasn’t he been running again all along, ever since the last race ended? Well, yes, but now it’s official. Thus the pre-game stages of the 2010 race go on…

Commish Outtakes: This is one of those “You had to be there to really understand it” tidbits - the kind of thing that crops up every now and then if you attend enough civic meetings - but it bears mentioning nonetheless. At last week’s budget work session, District Attorney Ken Mauldin gave commissioners an odd, circuitous, aggrieved lecture about the impact of recent years’ budget cuts - mainly from the state, not the county - on his office. There’s no reason to argue with what he had to say, but Mauldin’s tone implied that other local decision-makers have not internalized how difficult it is to manage government when budgets are tight. Everyone has, around here, and everyone’s going forward with a shared sense of the clear thinking required at a time like this. And that’s something our local government deserves credit for, that’s all.

Leaf & Limb: “The March 2, 2009 [snow] storm caused more damage and required more debris pickup than any other storm since unification,” says an ACC press release explaining that private haulers are now assisting city crews with the extra-heavy leaf-and-limb workload that they’ve been slogging through since the snowstorm. Hmm… wonder how many trees unification knocked down?

Lastly, the Broun File: Needless to say, this week’s column would not be complete without a mention of the latest idea from U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, Jr., to introduce a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Let us be sure we understand what our congressman is doing: He is doing nothing more than toying with fundamental questions of civil and human rights simply to raise his own profile as a politician, to try to garner more face time on TV. He is returning to the Rove-era politics of bigotry for the single, simple-minded reason that more people will know his name henceforth because of it. Rather than take productive part in the work going on in Washington to strengthen our country and our community, he is trafficking in cheap symbolism. His amendment will go nowhere; it will disappear from the halls of Congress sooner or later. If only he would, too.

Ben Emanuel

ben@flagpole.com