Who Goes Where?
The Commissioners Pee At 7:00 Sharp

The clock on the wall says 7:00 sharp. It is an old clock, in the ACC Commission chambers. The hands never move. The clock is broken. Nevertheless, twice a day it is right. Is this some kind of symbol?

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Nothing in the commission chambers changes, except one: where is Hugh Logan? Commissioner Jordan still talks about light pollution. Rental registration is still a hot topic - well, a warm topic. It is summertime, and not so many people crowd the hallway. After two hours of county business, neither vital nor dull, the mayor declares a break. Her timing is good. The clock on the wall reads 7:00 sharp.

Commissioners and spectators wander the atrium. Lines form at the restrooms. Some commissioners join them. Others go upstairs to the locked washroom for commissioners only. But who are these commissioners who pee with the people? Why, Charles Carter and Tom Chasteen: salt of the earth. Mayor Davison? Upstairs. David Lynn? Upstairs. Carl Jordan? Didn't have to go.

Oliver Towne

Oliver Towne is a longtime observer of local government.

Last Chance
Cars Or People? Speak Up Now

Traffic congestion. Air pollution. Water pollution. Sprawl. Rising rates of obesity and heart disease. All these problems have something in common: a transportation policy that is based entirely on the automobile. This has been the status quo for decades - but right now we have a chance to change that. We can make sure that other modes of transportation - like transit, walking and biking - are taken seriously.

Every year, a set of transportation projects is approved for funding by our local transportation planning unit, MACORTS (the Madison Athens-Clarke Oconee Regional Transportation Study). In order to be considered for federal, state and local dollars, projects must first be included in the Long Range Transportation Plan. The LRTP is updated infrequently; ours is basically unchanged since at least the early '90s, and is made up almost entirely of road projects in the ACC Greenbelt. Not only does this severely limit spending on walking, biking and transit projects, it thoroughly undercuts the goals of our anti-sprawl Comprehensive Land Use Plan.

But times are changing. MACORTS, staffed by the ACC Planning Department, and with the support of BikeAthens and many other citizen groups, is making an unprecedented effort to solicit public comments about how local residents envision the future of transportation in our area.

What would you like to see? Expanded transit routes and hours? Sunday bus service? More bus shelters? How about sidewalks in your neighborhood, or along your route to home or school? Sidewalks along busy routes like the Atlanta Highway? Crosswalks with educational "stop for pedestrians" signage? How about more bike lanes? Secure bike parking downtown? A rail-trail connecting the East Side with downtown? More Greenway bike and walking trails? Enforcement of speed limits on neighborhood streets? How about a transportation plan that enhances, rather than undermines, our anti-sprawl comprehensive land use plan?

So this is your chance. If you're happy with more and wider roads in the Greenbelt, you can sit back and relax. If, on the other hand, you'd like to see a more comprehensive set of transportation choices available to help people - rather than cars - get around, it's time to say so.

The public comment period ends Friday, August 15. You can send comments by email to: macorts@co.clarke.ga.us, or by U.S. mail to:

Athens-Clarke County Planning Dept.

Attn: Sherry Moore

120 W. Dougherty St.

Athens, GA 30601

Beth Gavrilles

Beth Gavrilles is the president of Athens Grow Green Coalition and a board member of BikeAthens.

Five-Acre Woods
DIY Park Escapes The Bulldozers

Ask Leafy Briggs how the county park known as "Five-Acre Woods" came to be, and she tells a story of impressive determination in a neighborhood where nature is fast giving way to development.

"I felt this just had to be done!" she says, standing on the trail that winds through the undeveloped woods off North Avenue. Our children won't become environmentalists unless they can spend time in natural areas, and not all children get to visit the North Georgia mountains. "When you eliminate nature in their neighborhood, you eliminate the contact with nature." Already, she says, the development of luxury apartments is pushing out those families the park was designed for.

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So convinced was Briggs that something had to be done, she and the Over the River Neighborhood Association pursued and got a $105,000 loan from a nonprofit group to purchase the property. Then with the help of Athens Land Trust, the property was permanently protected by a conservation easement from construction or disturbance of its natural state.

"It is really hard to find people with vision who are willing to put their money into something," says Briggs, but she found some, including R.E.M. and the Piedmont Garden Club, and a neighbor who "just wanted peace and quiet." The property was purchased without really knowing how the loan would be repaid.

Meanwhile, she and neighbor Helene Halstead pursued state Greenspace funding through ACC's Planning Department. Eventually, the project was chosen for funding, making the Five-Acre Woods the county's first purchase under the Governor's Greenspace Program. (Several additional properties are under consideration.) According to Bruce Lonnee of the ACC Planning Department, this was one of relatively few intown properties available at reasonable cost - partly because land is often leased for development instead of being offered for sale.

Briggs thinks people have come to expect government to take the initiative in such projects. "They never consider just doing it themselves... That's the only way anything gets done, is if you do it yourself," she says. "Anyone that wants to know how, I'll help them."

John Huie

John Huie is frequently a pest at meetings of BikeAthens, Federation of Neighborhoods and ACC Community Tree Council.

Lottery $
Save HOPE'S Money & Soul

With Georgia's state lottery revenue dwindling, Governor Purdue and the legislature will be searching for ways to keep the HOPE scholarship solvent. This is actually good news, because it's the perfect opportunity to make some much needed corrections in the HOPE formula. Our goal as a society, pertaining to the education of our citizenry, is clear and obvious.

We would ideally like to make the best education possible available to every single person. If there were a way to make all education opportunities available free of cost to everyone, that would be ideal, but presently we have no way to afford such a generous system. That said, it makes no sense whatsoever to spend state money to educate the rich and well off (who would obtain a good education even without the state's help) unless 100 percent of those people coming from poor families (who cannot afford a college education) have been given that opportunity first.

UGA Vice President for Student Affairs Richard Mullendore was recently quoted as saying that, "About half of last year's UGA freshman class said their family income was more than $100,000 dollars a year."

There is no good reason for any HOPE scholarship funds to be available to any family making over $100,000 annually. So, given that roughly half of UGA students fall into this category, making that change in the qualifying standard for the scholarship should save quite a bit of money, and the HOPE scholarship needs a lot more "saving" than just that.

The HOPE scholarship needs to have its soul saved. It's a cold-hearted and backwards logic that leads one to the conclusion that those people who do well in high school (keep a "B" average) need significant financial aid to further their education, while those who don't keep their grades at that level need no help at all. What makes us think that it's not the lesser students who need more help rather than the other way around? Who are these people who don't maintain a "B" average in high school? Some of them are students who simply didn't apply themselves in high school, but who still have the money to further their education if they choose. What about the rest? What about poor kids who don't "wise-up" to the need for a good education until after high school? What about troubled kids from dysfunctional homes and violent neighborhoods who were too busy simply trying to survive to learn? And the mentally disabled? Do we expect these people to just crawl under a rock and die? Well, guess what, they won't. Many of them will turn to a life of crime that ends up costing society a hell of a lot more than the price of even the best education.

The HOPE scholarship money that can be saved by stopping the "welfare for the rich" program should be spent on remedial education, technical schools and counseling and drug treatment for the people who really need HOPE the most. This is not sympathy for the undeserving; this is common sense for the good of us all.

Chip Shirley

Chip Shirley is a local freelance writer.

Rall's Rule
It Takes A Radical To Beat A Radical

Leftist or centrist? That's the big question facing Democrats in the run-up to next year's primaries. "The way to beat George Bush is not to be like him," declares former Vermont governor Howard Dean, whose feisty antiwar rhetoric has caught fire among liberals and made him the current frontrunner for the nomination. Seizing the centrist standard of the Clintonites, Senator Joe Lieberman warns that a liberal standard-bearer like Dean "could lead the Democratic Party into the political wilderness for a long time to come. It could be, really, a ticket to nowhere."

Who's right?

"[Democrats'] major goal is to beat George W. Bush," says Dick Bennett of the American Research Group, whose latest poll shows a third of Democrats undecided in evaluating the nine declared hopefuls. Among the other two-thirds, Dean leads, followed by liberal Sen. John Kerry, Lieberman and Rep. Dick Gephardt.

Turning left means disaster, argues the centrist Democratic Leadership Council: they say Dean, who opposes the Iraq war, would be 2004's George McGovern. When DLC poster boy Bill Clinton co-opted GOP platform planks like welfare reform and deficit reduction in 1992, he defeated the first President Bush. "The Democratic Party has an important choice to make: Do we want to vent or do we want to govern?" asks DLC chairman Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana. "The [Bush] administration is being run by the far right. The Democratic Party is being taken over by the far left."

History suggests that that may be a good thing.

Try to imagine an ideological 50-yard line, a perfect middle-of-the-road position that represents the median of American political thinking at any given time. George W. Bush falls as far to the right of that line as any president in memory. Bill Clinton sat a little to the left of that line; FDR was about as far to the left as Bush is to the right. In modern history, challengers have been most likely to beat incumbent presidents or vice presidents when they seemed to reside the same distance from that 50-yard line as their opponent. If you're trying to unseat a moderate, swing voters are key. Your best bet is to run as one yourself. But moderates don't beat extremists - extremists do, by motivating their base.

Call it Rall's Rule of Ideological Counterbalance.

In 1992, Bill Clinton faced an incumbent president who had run as a "kinder and gentler" Republican, a spacey New Age dude who urged Americans to become "a thousand points of light." A values, fiscal and foreign policy moderate, George Bush I raised taxes. He refused his Gulf War generals' entreaties to ignore the U.N. and push on to Baghdad. Though the recession hurt him, Bush hadn't scared or angered independent voters enough to make them turn to a left-wing Democrat. Clinton ran as a moderate - even his health-care plan, his platform's sole concession to liberalism, fell far short of socialized medicine - and won over an electorate eager for a change, but not a drastic one.

The DLC formula also applies to 1976, when a moderate Southern Democrat beat incumbent president Gerry Ford, a moderate Republican. Revisionist GOP pundits like to cast Jimmy Carter as a charter member of the "lunatic left" (they love their alliteration) but his budget launched the Reagan defense build-up of the '80s. Carter enacted the current draft registration system. And, to punish the Soviets for invading Afghanistan, he boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Carter, like Clinton, ran and governed as a centrist Proto-New Democrat.

When going up against right-wing Republican incumbents, however, Democrats do better with left-wing challengers. John F. Kennedy, an unabashed "Eastern establishment" liberal, won against an incumbent vice president - Richard Nixon - famous as a right-wing McCarthyite. The unabashedly liberal Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned against the militantly pro-business Herbert Hoover with the mondo-leftie New Deal. In both cases, voters felt that the political pendulum had swung too far right over the previous eight years; only a liberal Democrat president could correct that imbalance.

Reagan's 1980 defeat of Carter (right-winger beats moderate) is the only modern presidential election that doesn't validate the ideological-balance rule. In 1996, however, challenger Bob Dole failed to distance himself from Newt Gingrich's extremist "Republican Revolution" of 1994, came off as a right-winger, and lost to moderate Democrat Clinton. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis was far more left than the moderate Bush I of '88; Mondale's milquetoast moderation failed to attract sufficient angry liberal voters to counter Ronald Reagan's energized supporters in 1984.

Rall's Rule cuts both ways. Right-wing conservative Barry Goldwater might have given FDR a run for his money in 1936 but his hardcore "extremism is no vice" rhetoric spooked voters weighing him against Lyndon Johnson - who was, by 1964 standards, a centrist Southern Democrat. Four years later, Richard Nixon had learned from Goldwater's landslide defeat. During his '60s wilderness years, he recast himself as a moderate Republican, implied that he would end the Vietnam War, and defeated Vice President Humphrey, a moderate Democrat who implied that he wouldn't.

What about DLC bogeyman George McGovern? Before his 1972 re-election campaign, Richard Nixon had created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act. He negotiated the Paris Peace Accords to end the Vietnam War. He went to China, leading to the first U.S. diplomatic recognition of Communist China. He imposed anti-inflationary wage and price controls that enraged corporate America. Nixon's first term was one of moderate Republicanism. McGovern ran as a hard-left Democrat. Rall's Rule successfully explains the outcome.

As Democrats decide which approach to take against George W. Bush, a right-wing extremist whose agenda makes Barry Goldwater look tame by comparison, they should carefully consider recent history. A moderate nominee like Lieberman might have been a safe bet against Bush's father, but he's extremely unlikely to beat the radical son.

Ted Rall

Syndicated columnist and cartoonist Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue To Afghanistan and Back.