Mr. Environment
Coordinator Starts Work

Dr. Dick Field, former Chairman of the Oconee Rivers Greenway Commission, has been hired as ACC's new Environmental Coordinator. In that position, budgeted for the first time by Mayor Heidi Davison, he will coordinate the county's compliance with state and federal environmental regulations, and also serve as point man for citizen environmental concerns.

Field's handlebar mustache and persistent advocacy for Greenway projects and protections are familiar to commission-watchers. Trained originally as a forester, Field has also served on the Planning Commission and is currently on the county hearings board. He has resigned from his job developing specialized short courses at UGA's Georgia Center in order to take the new position, and so will no longer serve as one of UGA's representatives on the Greenway Commission.

The ACC position is something of an innovation. Several other Georgia counties have a staff person who coordinates local government compliance with state and federal requirements, but most don't also respond to citizen concerns or work within the government on environmental matters.

Several years ago, Commissioner Carl Jordan wrote a proposal detailing the history and increasing complexity of environmental impacts and the regulations that attempt to deal with them. "Traditional public-utilities and public-works functions are expanding into broad responsibilities for environmental protection," he wrote, adding that watershed protection in particular is becoming "more comprehensive and regional." Watersheds are the land areas that drain into rivers and creeks, and protecting the natural ability of the land to filter and cleanse rainwater is becoming a priority under new federal stormwater requirements. It is considered cheaper to protect drinking water by protecting the watershed areas than to purify it later when it is pumped from rivers or streams.

Field said he expects to coordinate the county's response to such state and federal regulations, and also to deal with other local governments and citizen groups. He said he has "no preconceptions" about the position, but expects his responsibilities to cover all departments, and said he will be meeting with department heads as he gets his bearings on the new job. He suggested that better enforcement of soil erosion laws and recently reported leaks in county sewage lines are problems he expects to address. Field works out of the Central Services Department in the courthouse and can be contacted at 613-3530.

The proposal for an environmental coordinator was taken up at last year's "environmental summit" of 13 local citizens' groups, and was one of the recommendations that came out of that meeting. (Others included implementing transferable development rights, extending stream protections, passing a tree ordinance and designating downtown Athens as an historic district.) Beth Gavrilles of Athens Grow Green Coalition says she "can't think of a better person for the job" than Dick Field, and hopes he will have input into plans for new development.

John Huie
John Huie is learning to play the fiddle.

The Doctor Is In
More Offices On Prince

Planning commissioners heard plans for a four-story, 86,890 square foot building for medical offices and retail space on Prince Avenue during Thursday night's meeting. The structure would also include a low, two-level parking deck with access to Nacoochee Avenue, behind the McDonald's on the corner of Prince and Nacoochee avenues.

The parking deck would sit atop the current location of the 33-unit Prince Rondavel apartments - one of the few remaining affordable housing sites near the center of town.

Karis Maxey, an apartment resident, said she was notified before Christmas of the owner's intention to sell the property. She did not know how the land would be developed.

Cheryl Benton, a Prince Rondavel resident for 13 years, said that many of the current residents moved in after losing their homes to apartment development in the Garden Springs neighborhood. Several families live in the complex of one- and two-bedroom apartments.

The office building would include a drugstore, perhaps a national chain, as well as other shops. The project was presented as the future of the Prince Avenue corridor, but the plans looked like a smaller, slightly more modern annex for Athens Regional Medical Center across the street.

Concerns over the size of the project and the traffic situation it would create were raised by members of the Historic Boulevard Neighborhood Association and members of the Planning Commission. Tony Eubanks, speaking for the HBNA, said the organization is interested in working with the developers. The proposal was accepted with comments and will be discussed again at a later Planning Commission meeting before going on to the Athens-Clarke County Commission for final determination.

It remains to be seen whether the loss of 33 more units of affordable housing will be discussed.

Aaron Jollay
Aaron Jollay is a recent UGA graduate with degrees in political science and journalism.

Animal Control
Last Week's Scorecard

Athens-Clarke County responded to 67 calls.

8 complaints of animal cruelty
1 bite case
5 complaints of barking dogs
2 ordinance violations
36 animals impounded
32 dogs
2 chickens
1 opossum
1 bat
25 dogs placed
9 adopted
3 reclaimed
13 turned over to other agencies

ACC Animal Control press release for the week of Jan. 1 to Jan. 7.

Tell It To The Judge
The Rent Law Is Back In Court

Athens' controversial rental regulation ordinance went on trial last week when the Athens Residential Rental Property Association asked Superior Court Judge Lawton Stephens for a temporary injunction against enforcing the law.

Judge Stephens has twice upheld the occupancy limits contained in the "definition-of-family" law, but seemed concerned that the county's requirement for keeping a list of the tenants who live in a house might border on illegal self-incrimination. "Does it go too far?" he asked, to require people to sign a document that would be used against them? He noted that the ordinance itself says the list must be kept in order "to establish evidence" of compliance. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution holds that no one may be "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."

But attorney Drew Marshall, who represented the county, countered that the required list of residents would only have to be shown to investigators if there were "probable cause" to suspect a violation. The county has backed down from requiring all rental houses to be registered, since a new state law was passed preventing it. But it still wants to require a designated "person-in-charge" at each rental home to maintain a form signed by all residents (and telling how they are related, if they claim to be related). The county has agreed not to enforce the requirement until Judge Stephens rules on the case.

Marshall argued that the ordinance clearly meets the legal test of being in the public interest, and accused the rental association of attacking the ordinance with an unfocused "grab-bag of theories."

Witnesses called by the association included its president, David Esary. A real estate broker who finds houses for investors to buy, Esary testified that people like to live in older homes with their large rooms and hardwood floors. But even people who aren't violating the occupancy rules have become fearful of renting houses, he said, because they don't want to divulge personal information. Esary said the rental property association has around 100 members, but lost about 30 of them when county attorneys demanded their identities.

County Manager Alan Reddish, who attended the hearing, told Flagpole the county is "in a difficult position" when citizens publicly admit that they are violating the county's occupancy limits (as some did at public hearings before rental registration was passed). ACC bars more than two unrelated persons from living together in single-family zones (minor children are exempt), and occupancy limits existed even before rental registration threatened to make enforcement more stringent. The county maintains that enforcement is mostly complaint-driven, but ACC's Planning Department investigated citizens who admitted, at public hearings, that they were violating the ordinance. Reddish said that was a "legitimate means" of enforcing county ordinances, and Commissioner Kathy Hoard told Flagpole she sees a "major difference between providing public opinion on issues and publicly admitting or flaunting one's actions in breaking our community's laws."

But Commissioner Charles Carter thinks it was "sort of underhanded" to invite citizens to express their views at a public hearing and then use it as a "tool to enforce the law."

County staffers have been under pressure from commissioners to improve enforcement of "quality of life" violations like front-yard parking and occupancy limits, and the enforcement process is being streamlined. County enforcement officers who testified at last week's hearing related some difficulties in finding the owners of homes, and said occupancy limits were "the most difficult" violation to prove since residents sometimes "were instructed not to speak to me at all," failed to answer the door, or gave questionable information when they did.

Judge Stephens will rule on the case after both sides have had the opportunity to file written arguments.

John Huie
John Huie can be reached at jphuie@athens.net

Pipe Dreams

Remember Afghanistan?

So where's the pipeline?

In 2001 common sense, expert opinion and extensive research convinced me and other Central Asia watchers that the United States didn't have much interest in saving Buddha statues or Afghan women when it went to war against the Taliban. After we turned down their offer to extradite Osama, it became obvious that we weren't interested in capturing the alleged mastermind of 9/11, either. Logic and evidence indicated that the Bush Administration focused on Afghanistan to make it secure for a pipeline to carry oil and natural gas from the landlocked Caspian Sea.

Here's the story in a nutshell. The former Soviet republics surrounding the Caspian Sea - particularly Kazakhstan - have the potential to become the biggest oil-producing nations on earth. "By 2050," reports the Asia Times, "the Persian Gulf/ Caspian Sea will account for more than 80 percent of world oil and natural gas production. Together, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian may have something like 800 billion barrels of oil and an energy equivalent amount in natural gas. Compare this figure with oil reserves in the Americas and in Europe: less than 160 billion barrels. And they will be exhausted before 2030." Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan want to build a pipeline to carry their oil and gas out to deep-sea ports. The shortest possible route would go through Iran, which the United States has declared part of an Axis of Evil. Second shortest is via Afghanistan, a dangerous proposition that the Clinton and Bush Administrations have nonetheless encouraged during and after Taliban rule. Top Bushies last met with Taliban officials in July, 2001, two months before 9/11. Negotiations broke down over transit fees, but top-level discussions between the United States, Turkmenistan and Pakistan resumed in October, while American bombs were still raining on Kabul. That led people like me to speculate that the invasion - which made little effort to catch Osama - was a transparent excuse to gain control over newly emerging energy resources.

Yet here we are two years later, some war supporters point out, and still no pipeline.

Well, not exactly.

It's not the sort of thing the U.S. media cares to report, but there has in fact been movement on the proposed Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAP). The Asian Development Bank, which hopes to finance a consortium of oil companies to finance the $3.5 billion (originally $2 billion) project, has already spent millions of dollars on feasibility studies and surveys along the proposed route from Herat, a city near Afghanistan's northwest border with Turkmenistan, to Kandahar, the former Taliban spiritual capital close to the southeastern frontier with Pakistan. The U.S.-led occupation coalition has promised to make paving the future TAP service highway the nation's top rebuilding priority. The ADB has hosted meetings between officials of Afghanistan and the two nations on each end of the thousand-mile-long conduit: Turkmenistan, which would ship Kazakh crude oil and its own natural gas from its Daultebad refineries, and Pakistan, which hopes to export the energy resources to deep-sea tankers via its Multan port on the Arabian Sea.

Turkmen prime minister Yolly Gurganmuradov, Afghan minister of mines and industry Mehfooz Nedai and Pakistani petroleum minister Nouraiz Shakoor held their seventh TAP meeting in Islamabad on December 10, 2003, where they decided on a 2010 target date for completion. Official groundbreaking for TAP, predicted to occur last year during a rash of post-Mullah Omar optimism, now awaits ADB verification that Pakistan can handle the anticipated volume of Turkmen gas. That study won't be completed until at least September 2004.

Far more worrisome is the Afghan government's dubious assurance that it "will provide complete security to the project," according to Pakistan's official news agency. The TAP route cuts through territory controlled by Herati warlord Ishmael Khan and several ex-Taliban commanders who would almost certainly threaten to blow it up unless they receive ad hoc "transit fees." The Karzai government in Kabul - headed by a former consultant to Unocal, the oil company that originally pitched TAP to the Taliban in 1995 - can't possibly make good on its assurance.

The challenges are virtually insurmountable, yet the three nations see reasons to justify working to meet a March 2004 financing deadline. A recent diplomatic thaw with India has opened up the possibility of extending the pipeline across Pakistan. "If Pakistan can find within itself the strength and wisdom to change its current approach towards India, there are immense benefits that it can derive as a transit route for the movement of energy, goods and people," Indian foreign minister Yashwant Sinha said January 3. Even better, the star of TAP's biggest promoter - the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan - is rising. "Bush's pet Afghan" Zalmay Khalilzad, Karzai's ex-colleague at Unocal, is receiving kudos from grateful top Bushies. Last week the ubiquitous Khalilzad strong-armed delegates to the loya jirga into accepting a new constitution that ratifies Karzai's role as a U.S.-backed puppet dictator. TAP proponents hope Khalilzad's increased influence will convince Unocal and other U.S. companies to join the consortium.

I wrote about TAP as a motivation for the Afghan invasion in my book Gas War. The Bushies invaded Afghanistan to build a pipeline that would never be feasible, I argued. "Afghanistan remains a disaster zone," writes the Kyrgyz-based Times of Central Asia after the latest Islamabad confab. "All transnational projects somehow involving this war-weary country seem to be doomed with troubles. [TAP] is no exception."

Delays and overruns are typical for big construction projects, but based on the news so far there's no reason to change my 2001 assessment. Until we inevitably withdraw our forces a few years from now, once again abandoning the Afghans to a cycle of death and horror we helped perpetuate, Bush and his Asian allies will keep trying to build their doomed pipeline.

Ted Rall
Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists.