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Sep 10, 2003
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Lawyers Say UGA Stole Plan
This time of year, college students are blamed for all manner of social ills. They are accused of disturbing the peace in neighborhoods, clogging roads with cars and stealing various things, from road signs and livestock to larger objects such as football goalposts. Add to the list of complaints one lodged by two local attorneys, who allege that college students have stolen their business plan.
The law firm of Dorminey and Cox has sued a group of University of Georgia business students, claiming the students misappropriated their business plan "to provide an international cash transfer service for Hispanic workers in the United States... at a reasonable cost utilizing high-tech media."
According to the suit, MBA students Frank Marley III, Luis Imery and Christopher Griggs stole the plan while researching it as part of a class project. One student, Marley, worked on the idea with Dorminey and Cox while interning with the university's "New Media Synergy Center," which matches students with entrepreneurs in developing high-tech business startups.
The students withdrew from the partnership with Dorminey and Cox last September, claiming the lawyers' plan wasn't feasible "because of the increased regulatory burden on international cash transactions occasioned by the events of September 11, 2001," according to a suit filed in Clarke County Superior Court.
The students went on to win first prize in a statewide business plan competition with their entry, "International Cash Connections," the suit states. They have incorporated the firm, apparently hoping to use surcharges to tap into billions of dollars flowing out of the U.S. yearly in immigrant cash transfers. In a glowing write-up in the Athens Banner-Herald in March, they said they hoped to earn $20 to $25 for each transaction. Apparently they did not share these dreams with Dorminey and Cox.
"They let us believe they were going on to something completely different," plaintiff Blair Dorminey said.
For its part, the university is denying wrongdoing. The UGA Research Foundation, which is named in the suit, claims there was no trade secret to steal, so vague and broad was the attorneys' business plan to set up Internet-connected kiosks in Hispanic communities, with card-operated cash transfer as an option.
"You can't patent an idea in America," adds Charles Hofer, the students' professor of entrepreneurship at the Terry College of Business. What's more, the lawyers never went through the standard practice of having their young partners sign a non-disclosure or confidentiality agreement.
The court has yet to hold a hearing on the lawsuit, but Hofer has already reached a verdict regarding his young protégés: innocent. Hofer said his students acted properly in warning the attorneys of the pitfalls of their plan, including the likelihood of banks or stores barring a competing ATM or kiosk from setting up shop on their premises. "If the plan had been submitted by undergraduates, I would have given them a D," Hofer said.
After they dumped the lawyers last September, the students set about developing a markedly different plan, according to Hofer, including prepaid cards, like phone cards, that immigrant workers can buy at convenience stores or bodegas. The workers can then approve the money's transfer abroad by dialing a toll-free number.
"It was something they developed completely independently," Hofer says, adding that the students are one of hundreds of U.S. groups hoping to break into what is termed "international remittance," a trade currently dominated by Western Union and other wire-transfer operations. "The idea that this is something new is totally ridiculous," he says.
Still, Dorminey and David Cox have hired attorneys Hue Henry and Chris Casey, and they like their chances in court. Dorminey says they were disadvantaged from the start of the partnership, being forbidden from entering a standard confidentiality agreement with the students.
"We were told we couldn't do this with students," Dorminey says, adding that he and Cox were told that the university would guarantee the secrecy of the business product. "Instead of giving them an F or asking them to leave the school, they sent them to state and national competition... I've been appalled that the school and the dean have not been more concerned to set an example to students."
Joan Stroer
Joan Stroer is a local freelance writer.
How Many?
Site Compares Rent Laws
While the public debate over rental regulation has been waged in commission meetings, courtrooms, letters to the editor and conversations at the local watering hole for the past six months, a small core of dedicated residents has been quietly organizing the troops.
On Tuesday, Sept. 9, the Athens Fair Housing Association (AFHA) launched www.athensfairhousing.com, a website that contains at its core an extensive chart that compares rental laws among various cities.
Athens resident and AFHA member Krysia Haag did most of the quantitative research.
"I began the comparison chart effort because I had a gut feeling that [the] Athens definition of family and rental housing policies are more hard line than other university towns throughout the U.S.," Haag said. "I wanted to see for myself where we stand."
Haag visited close to 200 city websites, with about a 50 percent response rate. Her findings are based on an email questionnaire that she sent to local authorities.
The website is just one small part of a publicity campaign that the members of AFHA hope will get more Athens residents involved, particularly those who will be most affected by the passing of strict rental ordinances.
Over the next two weeks, members are planning to hit the streets, literally, with various grassroots tactics, which they are keeping mostly tight-lipped about.
AFHA member Megan Hesse believes that the fight for fair housing in Athens is not over yet, that in fact it's just beginning.
"I know that the majority of the commissioners have said we need to take another look at the definition of family," Hesse said, referring to the Athens-Clarke County law that allows no more than two unrelated persons to live together in the same household.
The ACC commission should change the definition to three, many members of the AFHA believe. This would make it easier for fixed-income and lower-income people to rent apartments and houses and for individuals to become property owners by using renters to help with mortgage payments.
The new rental ordinance was scheduled to go into effect on Sept. 7, but on Sept. 3 Superior Court Judge Lawton Stephens blocked enforcement of the ordinance until he hears the lawsuit, beginning Oct. 1.
Sarah Warfield
Sarah Warfield is a local freelance writer.
Build It
And They Will Come
Clarke County Sheriff Ira Edwards appeared before the ACC mayor and commission meeting Sept. 2, one of a parade of speakers asking support for worthy projects. Edwards wants to expand the jail. Nobody argued with the sheriff's contention that more jail space is needed, since prisoners are sometimes sleeping on the floor. But Commissioners Sims and Maxwell both suggested the community ought to be figuring out how to keep people out of jail, too.
Could this be a trend? The United States now imprisons a larger proportion of its citizens than any country in the world (although China executes a higher percentage). A quarter of U.S. inmates are drug offenders. Costs run to $40,000 a year, per prisoner. Politicians seem unable to resist passing arbitrary and punitive laws, including mandatory sentences, or three-strikes and two-strikes laws such as Georgia's law that mandates life without parole for second-time violent offenders. Such laws give no recourse to judges, parole boards or even jurors - and certainly don't encourage plea bargains. More cases are going to trial, and backing up in county jails.
Coupled with the poor legal representation poor people often get, the system amounts to a war on the poor. No wonder many people want nothing to do with the police. Almost all area jails are filled to capacity, and thousands of arrest warrants go unserved (over 3000 now in ACC) for traffic offenses, probation violations and the like.
Commissioner Maxwell noted that in Clarke County, our schools still hold classes in trailers. Why not build more schools, he asked, instead of more jails?
John Huie
John Huie is frequently a pest at meetings of BikeAthens, Federation of Neighborhoods and ACC Community Tree Council.
Paint It
And They Will Ride
Last week local bike activists and others got a look at final plans for re-striping parts of four Athens streets with bike lanes. As approved by the ACC mayor and commission in March, Oglethorpe Avenue will have bike lanes added (from Prince to Sunset Drive); bike lanes will be added to Williams Street between the Greenway trail and UGA; the existing bike path alongside East Campus Road will be extended slightly to reach Milledge Avenue; and on Alps Road, bike lanes will be added between Baxter and Broad. All the projects connect with existing bike facilities; however the bike lanes now in place on Hawthorne Avenue are scheduled for removal when the road is eventually five-laned.
Signs to alert motorists to the presence of bicyclists will be posted when the re-stripings are done. Signs will also be posted along Prince and Milledge Avenues. The $270,000 slate of projects was developed (at commissioners' insistence) in consultation with BikeAthens. Work may be finished next fall. All funding is local.
According to ACC Public Works Director David Clark, businesses along Alps Road have been contacted and are generally "very favorable," perhaps because no additional street width will be taken by the county. Car travel lanes will be reduced from 12 feet wide to 10-and-one-half feet (slightly under standard width). In conjunction with renovations being done at the shopping center, Colonial Promenade at Beechwood will add a new sidewalk and plant street trees along Alps Road (as required by the county land-use plan).
Because the new bike lanes will be less than the standard five-foot width (most are four), Clark prefers to call them "bike areas" and is reluctant to mark them off with a continuous white line on the pavement. Instead, plans call for "skip stripes," or dashed lines 22 feet apart - a plan which frustrates some bicyclists, who would prefer a clearer separation from auto lanes.
Clark thinks it may be difficult to find funding for bike projects beyond those presently planned, but expects the county to complete several others already begun or under serious consideration: bike lanes on College Station Road, Research Road and Milledge Avenue, and a proposed rail-trail along Winterville Road.
John Huie
John Huie is frequently a pest at meetings of BikeAthens, Federation of Neighborhoods and ACC Community Tree Council.
Call Me
But Not From My Backyard
Everybody wants a cell phone, but the towers that operate them are not always as popular. Some Five Points residents have, apparently, successfully opposed Verizon Wireless' request for an exception to the county's cell-tower ordinance that limits how near a historic district such a tower can be built. Verizon's preferred site, on land owned by Campus View Church of Christ on Lumpkin, is about 30 feet closer to the Bloomfield Historic District than the ordinance allows.
The ACC government drew up its own cell-tower ordinance in 1997 with input from a Georgia Tech consultant as well as the cell phone industry. At the time, the consultant predicted as many as 200 towers might be built in ACC. There are now, however, only 38, and the ACC planning department receives only a few new applications a year. The ordinance limits the number of towers by requiring different companies to share the same towers. It also prohibits towers in residential zones or downtown, requires landscaping around the base of towers and specifies that "existing mature tree growth and natural land forms on the site shall be preserved" as far as possible.
The ordinance does not address the possible health effects of high-frequency radio waves, which are similar in frequency but lower in power than a microwave oven. Any such effects are unproven, and users probably get much more radiation from their own phones clamped to their heads than from a relatively low-power tower a block away. TV and radio stations broadcast with much higher powers than cell towers. The debate about possible health effects of electromagnetic radiation - also emitted by power lines and even home appliances - continues. But even those who argue that cancer rates are higher than ever usually point to industrial chemicals in food, water and air as the culprits.
But ACC's ordinance omits health concerns from consideration in siting cell towers, because the 1996 Federal Telecommunications Act prohibits such considerations.
Opponent Hilary Ruston finds this frustrating. "We just don't know yet" whether the towers are dangerous, she says, but thinks it is only prudent to keep them at least 1500 feet from schools. Some states and Canadian provinces have done just that, she says. The Verizon tower would have been near Barrow Elementary School.
Ruston has been forced to tailor her objections to those that can legally be considered. Speaking before the ACC Hearings Board on Aug. 13, she called the elementary school an "historic site."
Five Points resident Susan Field also opposes Verizon's request, saying that any variance from the ordinance "will erode neighborhoods and historic districts." Now Verizon has withdrawn its request, and UGA is considering allowing one or more towers to be sited on campus. According to UGA administrator Tom Bowen, a decision will come "sometime soon."
John Huie
John Huie is... well, you already know.
Institute Index
The Color of Money
o Percent of North Carolina contributors to presidential campaigns that are men: 67
o Percent that are white: 96
o Number of North Carolina contributors to George Bush's campaign that are African American: 0
o Amount of N.C. contributions to John Edwards' campaign from people of color: $45,725
o Amount from white Republicans: $85,870
Copyright © 2003 Institute for Southern Studies. P.O. Box 531, Durham, NC 27702; (919) 419-8311; www.southernstudies.org.
Ground Zero
The Other 9/11 Flight
Shanksville, August 29-30: Stacy Duppstadt, 37, knows irony when she sees it. "My brother, Rick King, is the assistant fire chief in Shanksville. He called me when we got the news about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We knew there was at least one more plane. He told me 'Don't worry. Those things are heading for the big cities.'"
Stonycreek Twp. is not the big city. The hilly and thickly wooded Stonycreek's 2200 residents like their privacy and their quiet. There are no bars, but there are seven churches.
Many in the area did not notice the sound of Flight 93 because they were glued to their TV sets, watching coverage of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. But they felt the plane hit the ground.
"This building just roared and shook," said Duppstadt, who works at the family store a couple of miles from the crash site. "My husband has a butcher shop close to the site. He was killing that day. He heard the whistle of the plane as it went over, then the explosion. He thought we had been hit by a missile. He thought it was all over."
Emergency workers found much less at the site than they expected.
"This is what our firefighters found that morning," said Janie, one of 40 or so volunteer "ambassadors" who work in two-hour shifts at the site. She declined to give her last name. She held up a photo.
"The crater was about 15 feet deep. They dug it out and found bits of the airplane 47 feet down."
That was about it. There were no big pieces of the aircraft. There was nothing at the site, in fact, that couldn't be picked up in one hand.
Enough material was recovered to provide DNA matches for every individual on the aircraft, Janie said. But officials estimate that 92 percent of the Boeing and its passengers are out there, vaporized, or hammered into the rocky soil. The county coroner has said that as far as he is concerned, it is a cemetery.
The memorial is a stretch of cyclone fence, 35 feet long and 10 feet high, erected on a frame of two by fours. Nearby between two flagpoles stands a brass and granite monument to the passengers and crew of UAL Flight 93. Several other monuments, from large stone or metal slabs presented by various groups and individuals, are arranged nearby.
Mementos left by visitors crowd every surface of the memorial. Among them are hundreds of hats, several firefighters' helmets, scores of American flags in various sizes and shapes, jewelry, a tiny plastic model of the White House, golf balls, a golf club, teddy bears, a motel room key, a container of jellied fruit, religious icons, a Shanksville Volunteer Fire Company turnout coat and a medal bearing the likeness of St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers.
People who have nothing to leave write messages on stones and leave those. "God Bless." "Thank You." "Let's Roll," Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer's words as he and his fellow passengers were about to attack their captors.
More than one visitor to the site said they felt they were standing on holy ground.
Before 9/11, Skyline Road didn't go anywhere noteworthy, other than to a dump where Pepsi vending machines go when they die. It might have seen five or six cars a day.
Now, its pavement is pounded to rubble by an estimated 5,000 vehicles a week - everything from motorcycles to tour buses - on the way to the memorial...
Terry W. Burger
Longtime Athens resident Terry W. Burger is currently a news bureau chief for The Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News, where a longer version of this story appears.
9/11 + 2
What The Scholars Think
A Panel Discussion, "Legal And Political Ramifications In The Fight Against International Terrorism," will be held from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 11 in the Hatton-Lovejoy Courtroom on the second floor of the UGA Law School.
Dr. Howard Wiarda, Dean Rusk Professor of International Affairs and International Affairs Department Head, moderates.
Panelists include: Professor Dan Bodansky, Emily and Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law; Professor Gabriel Wilner Associate Dean, International Comparative and Graduate Legal Studies and Executive Director, Dean Rusk Center; Dr. Nathan Busch, Visiting Assistant Professor in International Affairs and Dr. Han Park, Professor of International Affairs and Director, The Center For The Study Of Global Issues (Globis).
The discussion is free and is open to the public.
Lawyers Say UGA Stole Plan
This time of year, college students are blamed for all manner of social ills. They are accused of disturbing the peace in neighborhoods, clogging roads with cars and stealing various things, from road signs and livestock to larger objects such as football goalposts. Add to the list of complaints one lodged by two local attorneys, who allege that college students have stolen their business plan.
The law firm of Dorminey and Cox has sued a group of University of Georgia business students, claiming the students misappropriated their business plan "to provide an international cash transfer service for Hispanic workers in the United States... at a reasonable cost utilizing high-tech media."
According to the suit, MBA students Frank Marley III, Luis Imery and Christopher Griggs stole the plan while researching it as part of a class project. One student, Marley, worked on the idea with Dorminey and Cox while interning with the university's "New Media Synergy Center," which matches students with entrepreneurs in developing high-tech business startups.
The students withdrew from the partnership with Dorminey and Cox last September, claiming the lawyers' plan wasn't feasible "because of the increased regulatory burden on international cash transactions occasioned by the events of September 11, 2001," according to a suit filed in Clarke County Superior Court.
The students went on to win first prize in a statewide business plan competition with their entry, "International Cash Connections," the suit states. They have incorporated the firm, apparently hoping to use surcharges to tap into billions of dollars flowing out of the U.S. yearly in immigrant cash transfers. In a glowing write-up in the Athens Banner-Herald in March, they said they hoped to earn $20 to $25 for each transaction. Apparently they did not share these dreams with Dorminey and Cox.
"They let us believe they were going on to something completely different," plaintiff Blair Dorminey said.
For its part, the university is denying wrongdoing. The UGA Research Foundation, which is named in the suit, claims there was no trade secret to steal, so vague and broad was the attorneys' business plan to set up Internet-connected kiosks in Hispanic communities, with card-operated cash transfer as an option.
"You can't patent an idea in America," adds Charles Hofer, the students' professor of entrepreneurship at the Terry College of Business. What's more, the lawyers never went through the standard practice of having their young partners sign a non-disclosure or confidentiality agreement.
The court has yet to hold a hearing on the lawsuit, but Hofer has already reached a verdict regarding his young protégés: innocent. Hofer said his students acted properly in warning the attorneys of the pitfalls of their plan, including the likelihood of banks or stores barring a competing ATM or kiosk from setting up shop on their premises. "If the plan had been submitted by undergraduates, I would have given them a D," Hofer said.
After they dumped the lawyers last September, the students set about developing a markedly different plan, according to Hofer, including prepaid cards, like phone cards, that immigrant workers can buy at convenience stores or bodegas. The workers can then approve the money's transfer abroad by dialing a toll-free number.
"It was something they developed completely independently," Hofer says, adding that the students are one of hundreds of U.S. groups hoping to break into what is termed "international remittance," a trade currently dominated by Western Union and other wire-transfer operations. "The idea that this is something new is totally ridiculous," he says.
Still, Dorminey and David Cox have hired attorneys Hue Henry and Chris Casey, and they like their chances in court. Dorminey says they were disadvantaged from the start of the partnership, being forbidden from entering a standard confidentiality agreement with the students.
"We were told we couldn't do this with students," Dorminey says, adding that he and Cox were told that the university would guarantee the secrecy of the business product. "Instead of giving them an F or asking them to leave the school, they sent them to state and national competition... I've been appalled that the school and the dean have not been more concerned to set an example to students."
Joan Stroer
Joan Stroer is a local freelance writer.
How Many?
Site Compares Rent Laws
While the public debate over rental regulation has been waged in commission meetings, courtrooms, letters to the editor and conversations at the local watering hole for the past six months, a small core of dedicated residents has been quietly organizing the troops.
On Tuesday, Sept. 9, the Athens Fair Housing Association (AFHA) launched www.athensfairhousing.com, a website that contains at its core an extensive chart that compares rental laws among various cities.
Athens resident and AFHA member Krysia Haag did most of the quantitative research.
"I began the comparison chart effort because I had a gut feeling that [the] Athens definition of family and rental housing policies are more hard line than other university towns throughout the U.S.," Haag said. "I wanted to see for myself where we stand."
Haag visited close to 200 city websites, with about a 50 percent response rate. Her findings are based on an email questionnaire that she sent to local authorities.
The website is just one small part of a publicity campaign that the members of AFHA hope will get more Athens residents involved, particularly those who will be most affected by the passing of strict rental ordinances.
Over the next two weeks, members are planning to hit the streets, literally, with various grassroots tactics, which they are keeping mostly tight-lipped about.
AFHA member Megan Hesse believes that the fight for fair housing in Athens is not over yet, that in fact it's just beginning.
"I know that the majority of the commissioners have said we need to take another look at the definition of family," Hesse said, referring to the Athens-Clarke County law that allows no more than two unrelated persons to live together in the same household.
The ACC commission should change the definition to three, many members of the AFHA believe. This would make it easier for fixed-income and lower-income people to rent apartments and houses and for individuals to become property owners by using renters to help with mortgage payments.
The new rental ordinance was scheduled to go into effect on Sept. 7, but on Sept. 3 Superior Court Judge Lawton Stephens blocked enforcement of the ordinance until he hears the lawsuit, beginning Oct. 1.
Sarah Warfield
Sarah Warfield is a local freelance writer.
Build It
And They Will Come
Clarke County Sheriff Ira Edwards appeared before the ACC mayor and commission meeting Sept. 2, one of a parade of speakers asking support for worthy projects. Edwards wants to expand the jail. Nobody argued with the sheriff's contention that more jail space is needed, since prisoners are sometimes sleeping on the floor. But Commissioners Sims and Maxwell both suggested the community ought to be figuring out how to keep people out of jail, too.
Could this be a trend? The United States now imprisons a larger proportion of its citizens than any country in the world (although China executes a higher percentage). A quarter of U.S. inmates are drug offenders. Costs run to $40,000 a year, per prisoner. Politicians seem unable to resist passing arbitrary and punitive laws, including mandatory sentences, or three-strikes and two-strikes laws such as Georgia's law that mandates life without parole for second-time violent offenders. Such laws give no recourse to judges, parole boards or even jurors - and certainly don't encourage plea bargains. More cases are going to trial, and backing up in county jails.
Coupled with the poor legal representation poor people often get, the system amounts to a war on the poor. No wonder many people want nothing to do with the police. Almost all area jails are filled to capacity, and thousands of arrest warrants go unserved (over 3000 now in ACC) for traffic offenses, probation violations and the like.
Commissioner Maxwell noted that in Clarke County, our schools still hold classes in trailers. Why not build more schools, he asked, instead of more jails?
John Huie
John Huie is frequently a pest at meetings of BikeAthens, Federation of Neighborhoods and ACC Community Tree Council.
Paint It
And They Will Ride
Last week local bike activists and others got a look at final plans for re-striping parts of four Athens streets with bike lanes. As approved by the ACC mayor and commission in March, Oglethorpe Avenue will have bike lanes added (from Prince to Sunset Drive); bike lanes will be added to Williams Street between the Greenway trail and UGA; the existing bike path alongside East Campus Road will be extended slightly to reach Milledge Avenue; and on Alps Road, bike lanes will be added between Baxter and Broad. All the projects connect with existing bike facilities; however the bike lanes now in place on Hawthorne Avenue are scheduled for removal when the road is eventually five-laned.
Signs to alert motorists to the presence of bicyclists will be posted when the re-stripings are done. Signs will also be posted along Prince and Milledge Avenues. The $270,000 slate of projects was developed (at commissioners' insistence) in consultation with BikeAthens. Work may be finished next fall. All funding is local.
According to ACC Public Works Director David Clark, businesses along Alps Road have been contacted and are generally "very favorable," perhaps because no additional street width will be taken by the county. Car travel lanes will be reduced from 12 feet wide to 10-and-one-half feet (slightly under standard width). In conjunction with renovations being done at the shopping center, Colonial Promenade at Beechwood will add a new sidewalk and plant street trees along Alps Road (as required by the county land-use plan).
Because the new bike lanes will be less than the standard five-foot width (most are four), Clark prefers to call them "bike areas" and is reluctant to mark them off with a continuous white line on the pavement. Instead, plans call for "skip stripes," or dashed lines 22 feet apart - a plan which frustrates some bicyclists, who would prefer a clearer separation from auto lanes.
Clark thinks it may be difficult to find funding for bike projects beyond those presently planned, but expects the county to complete several others already begun or under serious consideration: bike lanes on College Station Road, Research Road and Milledge Avenue, and a proposed rail-trail along Winterville Road.
John Huie
John Huie is frequently a pest at meetings of BikeAthens, Federation of Neighborhoods and ACC Community Tree Council.
Call Me
But Not From My Backyard
Everybody wants a cell phone, but the towers that operate them are not always as popular. Some Five Points residents have, apparently, successfully opposed Verizon Wireless' request for an exception to the county's cell-tower ordinance that limits how near a historic district such a tower can be built. Verizon's preferred site, on land owned by Campus View Church of Christ on Lumpkin, is about 30 feet closer to the Bloomfield Historic District than the ordinance allows.
The ACC government drew up its own cell-tower ordinance in 1997 with input from a Georgia Tech consultant as well as the cell phone industry. At the time, the consultant predicted as many as 200 towers might be built in ACC. There are now, however, only 38, and the ACC planning department receives only a few new applications a year. The ordinance limits the number of towers by requiring different companies to share the same towers. It also prohibits towers in residential zones or downtown, requires landscaping around the base of towers and specifies that "existing mature tree growth and natural land forms on the site shall be preserved" as far as possible.
The ordinance does not address the possible health effects of high-frequency radio waves, which are similar in frequency but lower in power than a microwave oven. Any such effects are unproven, and users probably get much more radiation from their own phones clamped to their heads than from a relatively low-power tower a block away. TV and radio stations broadcast with much higher powers than cell towers. The debate about possible health effects of electromagnetic radiation - also emitted by power lines and even home appliances - continues. But even those who argue that cancer rates are higher than ever usually point to industrial chemicals in food, water and air as the culprits.
But ACC's ordinance omits health concerns from consideration in siting cell towers, because the 1996 Federal Telecommunications Act prohibits such considerations.
Opponent Hilary Ruston finds this frustrating. "We just don't know yet" whether the towers are dangerous, she says, but thinks it is only prudent to keep them at least 1500 feet from schools. Some states and Canadian provinces have done just that, she says. The Verizon tower would have been near Barrow Elementary School.
Ruston has been forced to tailor her objections to those that can legally be considered. Speaking before the ACC Hearings Board on Aug. 13, she called the elementary school an "historic site."
Five Points resident Susan Field also opposes Verizon's request, saying that any variance from the ordinance "will erode neighborhoods and historic districts." Now Verizon has withdrawn its request, and UGA is considering allowing one or more towers to be sited on campus. According to UGA administrator Tom Bowen, a decision will come "sometime soon."
John Huie
John Huie is... well, you already know.
Institute Index
The Color of Money
o Percent of North Carolina contributors to presidential campaigns that are men: 67
o Percent that are white: 96
o Number of North Carolina contributors to George Bush's campaign that are African American: 0
o Amount of N.C. contributions to John Edwards' campaign from people of color: $45,725
o Amount from white Republicans: $85,870
Copyright © 2003 Institute for Southern Studies. P.O. Box 531, Durham, NC 27702; (919) 419-8311; www.southernstudies.org.
Ground Zero
The Other 9/11 Flight
Shanksville, August 29-30: Stacy Duppstadt, 37, knows irony when she sees it. "My brother, Rick King, is the assistant fire chief in Shanksville. He called me when we got the news about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We knew there was at least one more plane. He told me 'Don't worry. Those things are heading for the big cities.'"
Stonycreek Twp. is not the big city. The hilly and thickly wooded Stonycreek's 2200 residents like their privacy and their quiet. There are no bars, but there are seven churches.
| |
Many in the area did not notice the sound of Flight 93 because they were glued to their TV sets, watching coverage of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. But they felt the plane hit the ground.
"This building just roared and shook," said Duppstadt, who works at the family store a couple of miles from the crash site. "My husband has a butcher shop close to the site. He was killing that day. He heard the whistle of the plane as it went over, then the explosion. He thought we had been hit by a missile. He thought it was all over."
Emergency workers found much less at the site than they expected.
"This is what our firefighters found that morning," said Janie, one of 40 or so volunteer "ambassadors" who work in two-hour shifts at the site. She declined to give her last name. She held up a photo.
"The crater was about 15 feet deep. They dug it out and found bits of the airplane 47 feet down."
That was about it. There were no big pieces of the aircraft. There was nothing at the site, in fact, that couldn't be picked up in one hand.
Enough material was recovered to provide DNA matches for every individual on the aircraft, Janie said. But officials estimate that 92 percent of the Boeing and its passengers are out there, vaporized, or hammered into the rocky soil. The county coroner has said that as far as he is concerned, it is a cemetery.
The memorial is a stretch of cyclone fence, 35 feet long and 10 feet high, erected on a frame of two by fours. Nearby between two flagpoles stands a brass and granite monument to the passengers and crew of UAL Flight 93. Several other monuments, from large stone or metal slabs presented by various groups and individuals, are arranged nearby.
Mementos left by visitors crowd every surface of the memorial. Among them are hundreds of hats, several firefighters' helmets, scores of American flags in various sizes and shapes, jewelry, a tiny plastic model of the White House, golf balls, a golf club, teddy bears, a motel room key, a container of jellied fruit, religious icons, a Shanksville Volunteer Fire Company turnout coat and a medal bearing the likeness of St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers.
People who have nothing to leave write messages on stones and leave those. "God Bless." "Thank You." "Let's Roll," Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer's words as he and his fellow passengers were about to attack their captors.
More than one visitor to the site said they felt they were standing on holy ground.
Before 9/11, Skyline Road didn't go anywhere noteworthy, other than to a dump where Pepsi vending machines go when they die. It might have seen five or six cars a day.
Now, its pavement is pounded to rubble by an estimated 5,000 vehicles a week - everything from motorcycles to tour buses - on the way to the memorial...
Terry W. Burger
Longtime Athens resident Terry W. Burger is currently a news bureau chief for The Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News, where a longer version of this story appears.
9/11 + 2
What The Scholars Think
A Panel Discussion, "Legal And Political Ramifications In The Fight Against International Terrorism," will be held from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 11 in the Hatton-Lovejoy Courtroom on the second floor of the UGA Law School.
Dr. Howard Wiarda, Dean Rusk Professor of International Affairs and International Affairs Department Head, moderates.
Panelists include: Professor Dan Bodansky, Emily and Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law; Professor Gabriel Wilner Associate Dean, International Comparative and Graduate Legal Studies and Executive Director, Dean Rusk Center; Dr. Nathan Busch, Visiting Assistant Professor in International Affairs and Dr. Han Park, Professor of International Affairs and Director, The Center For The Study Of Global Issues (Globis).
The discussion is free and is open to the public.
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