Where Does Water Go?
And What Goes With It?

"It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring." When the old man snores, rain tumbles out of the sky onto everything. Parking lots, rooftops and other impervious surfaces are washed clean of debris. Stormwater rushes down city drains, carrying along oil drippings and brake dust from cars and trucks, dog droppings, cigarette butts and other trash. Yum. Few people stop to think about what happens to all those pollutants once they're down our city's storm drains. Out of sight means out of mind, right? Well, not anymore.
Area residents are learning how water rushing over streets, driveways and parking lots is pouring directly into our local streams. Today, there are fewer natural areas (forests, meadows, wetlands) available to absorb the rain. In cities and suburbs, stormwater rushes through, straight into rivers with loads of debris. Yet, these are the same rivers which supply our drinking water.
Back in the 1950s, point source pollution became a concern as industries and utilities continued to dump raw waste water into our rivers. A way to think about "point source" pollution is that one can actually "point" to, or identify, the place from which the pollution started. In 1972, The Clean Water Act required communities to focus initially on point source pollution and decrease those dumping practices.
Today, nonpoint source pollution is a growing concern. Nonpoint source pollution means that many different sites across a community contribute to the problem. In short, polluted water is coming from our neighborhoods, schools, farmlands, construction sites and businesses whenever there's a storm. Action had to be taken by the Athens-Clarke County government to deal with the Clean Water Act requirements for decreasing water pollution and flooding. Although, federally mandated, these stormwater requirements are actually administered at the state level by the Environmental Protection Division.
Last year, the ACC Mayor and Commission created a citizen advisory group - the Stormwater Advisory Committee (SAC) - with representatives from the community, UGA, the ACC government, the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce and home-building and environmental organizations. One of their assigned tasks was to develop recommendations for funding stormwater pollution cleanup and water treatment.
Last summer, this committee evaluated several options to fund the stormwater program. They considered a balanced funding strategy which included development fees, SPLOST funds, as well as a stormwater utility. The SAC recommended these three mechanisms as the best options among all those considered. Increasing taxes was also discussed as an option, but was not recommended.
As SAC Chair Jason Peek explains, "Increasing taxes across the board isn't really the most equitable way to raise the revenue needed to fund a stormwater program. A stormwater utility fee takes into account that some places have fewer impervious surfaces than others and therefore contribute less to the need for stormwater management." Peek is also the ACC Public Works Engineer Administrator.
So stormwater utility fees were included in the recommendations to the mayor and commission as a way to charge property owners for the quantity of stormwater running off their particular area. This proposed rate structure may be for businesses and homes, as well as schools and churches. The idea is to spread out the costs as fairly as possible through these stormwater utility fees, sales tax revenues and grants in order to pay for the $5 million worth of drainage and program improvements needed to meet federal requirements. These recommendations were presented on Tuesday, May 11 at the mayor and commission's work session.
ACC Stormwater Education Coordinator Cail Hammons is working hard to explain why anyone who likes to drink water needs to understand the stormwater issue. She says, "Most people don't think about where the water from a rain shower goes after it hits the ground and flows into the nearest stormdrain. The truth is that stormdrains are not connected to any sort of water treatment plant, so anything that goes into a stormdrain ultimately ends up in our rivers, lakes and streams."
Public hearings on the stormwater program are scheduled for June, and the dates will be announced later.

Liz Conroy

Liz Conroy is a local freelance writer specializing in the environment.

Desegregating Athens
A Documentary Recalls

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in May 1954, the Athens-Clarke County Library will host an event at 3 p.m. Sunday, May 23 to revisit the desegregation of the public school system in Athens-Clarke County.
A portion of a documentary aired by Westinghouse Television's Group W Urban America Unit in 1972 will be shown. The documentary, from the University of Georgia Libraries, Peabody Awards Collection, examines the comparatively peaceful process of school desegregation in three Southern cities, including Athens.
"The documentary was submitted for a Peabody Award in the '70s and was preserved, along with other entries, as part of a 1998 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities," said Mary Miller, cataloger for the Peabody Collection. "When it was catalogued, we were excited to learn that one of the communities featured was Clarke County."
The documentary includes comments by UGA's Dean William Tate, Clarke County Board of Education attorney Eugene Epting and School Superintendent Charles McDaniel. A segment focusing on Oglethorpe Avenue Elementary School includes an interview with Principal Estelle Farmer, footage of Bridget Withers' 4th grade class and scenes from an Oglethorpe PTA meeting.
The process of desegregating the Clarke County schools occurred over a period of several years, beginning in 1963 and continuing through 1970, the first year all schools in the county were desegregated. That year, the formerly all-white Athens High School was renamed Clarke Central High School and incorporated students from the formerly all-black Burney-Harris High School. The documentary includes comments from Clarke Central classmates Jan Pulliam and Leo Scott.
Scott, who is currently director of operations and custodial services for the Clarke County School District, will be among panelists who will discuss the documentary following the screening. Other panelists include Robert Pratt, a UGA professor who specializes in African-American and Southern history, with an emphasis on school desegregation and the civil rights movement; Monica Knight, director of the Clarke County School District's 20th Century Community Learning Centers; Howard Stroud, former Clarke County School District Associate Superintendent; and community activist Evelyn Neeley.
"We hope the panelists will stimulate discussion with those in attendance," said Laura Carter, Heritage Room librarian at the Athens-Clarke County Library. "We want to remember what was lost and gained during the desegregation process and want community involvement in the discussion. We're also hoping audience members can help us identify more of those who appear in the documentary."
Selected stills from the video will be on display at the library and also can be viewed on a special page created on the UGA Libraries Web site: http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/events/other/brown50/index.html.
UGA's Office of Institutional Diversity is joining the UGA and Athens-Clarke County libraries in sponsoring the event.
"In 2001, the University of Georgia marked the 40th anniversary of its desegregation in 1961 by Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes," said Keith Parker, UGA associate provost for institutional diversity. "It's appropriate to look back and remember what followed in the next several years. The 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision reminds us of where we've been and of goals we still need to achieve to assure a quality education for all."

Sharron Hannon

Sharron Hannon is special assistant to the provost at UGA.

Higher Pie
Sayings Of George W.

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
And potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet
Become more few?

How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull
on the pantleg of opportunity.

I know that the human being
And the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope,
Where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!

Richard Thompson

Washington Post writer Richard Thompson arranged these actual quotations from George W. Bush in Haiku form.

Torture Apologists
All Right With The Right

"If American life and values change radically because of the attacks," ABC's Sam Donaldson wrote, 10 days after 9/11, "the terrorists will have won."
Well. As photo after photo confirms story after story of systemic torture, rape and murder by American servicemen, CIA goons and mercenary rent-a-cops in U.S. concentration camps from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad to Bagram Air Base near Kabul to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a legion of right-wing fifth columnists is finally revealing themselves as a band of wannabe fascists.
Incredible as it seems, these "Americans" actually approve of torture.
Talk radio king Rush Limbaugh, comparing the SS-style siccing of vicious German shepherds on Iraqi POWs to a fraternity initiation prank, led the charge of the torture apologists: "All right, so we're at war with these people. And they're in a prison where they're being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it's pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation - and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world." If cruelty is carefully calibrated to cultural mores, who cares whether it's wrong?
Besides, argues El Rushbaugh, the torturers were just funnin': "You ever heard of emotional release? You heard of need to blow some steam off?" Boys (and girls) will be (psycho) boys.
Days after articles of impeachment were introduced against him in the House of Representatives, the indefatigable Don Rumsfeld told a Senate committee that even now, even after Abu Ghraib, denying POWs sleep, starving them, subjecting them to painful "stress positions" and other forms of torture are still being inflicted upon inmates - guilty or innocent and always uncharged - throughout his Defense Department gulags.
His reception was a friendly one.
"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment [of Iraqi POWs]," spat Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a card-holding member of the Party of Lincoln, to fellow members of the Armed Services Committee. "You know, they're not there for traffic violations. They're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents."
Actually, according to the Red Cross report on Abu Ghraib, 90 percent of the detainees had been "arrested by mistake."
Inhofe's rant continued: "I have to say when we talk about the treatment of these prisoners that I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein is not in charge of these prisons." Yup, that's no doubt the expression on their faces: gratitude.
"Some people are overreacting," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay after viewing photos and tapes of bloodied prisoners forced to sodomize themselves and one another.
Liberals don't have a monopoly on moral relativism.
You have to go down a long way to get to the darkest cellars of immorality. As Bush Administration apologists point out, there are worse fates - far worse fates - than being stripped, beaten, bitten or even anally raped. A worse fate befell Nick Berg, the cellular phone entrepreneur who was beheaded by Iraqi insurgents. So what's the point? Dishonest attempts to reduce the moral baseline merely reiterate one's own ethical inferiority. The fact that other human beings can conceive of miseries even crueler and more painful to inflict cannot exculpate us for the sins we commit. Is the robber less guilty because he can look down on the kidnapper? Shall we forgive Hitler for killing six million Jews if someone else kills seven?
Other leading lights of conservatism are handling the prison torture scandal by ignoring it. In a TV appearance columnist and Fox News regular Ann Coulter blamed Abu Ghraib on "girl soldiers," but her column has been conspicuously silent about the biggest story since the end of the Democratic primaries. Coulter's last two missives focused on the hot topics of airport security and the need for tighter immigration. Maybe she's playing ostrich to avoid criticizing the Republican conduct of the Iraq war - a conflict so poorly conceived that no one even bothered to name it. Either that, or she approves of torture. In any case, her refusal to condemn American atrocities makes her a torture apologist, too.
In a way, so is General Antonio Taguba, author of the famous Abu Ghraib report. He blames the prisoner abuse scandal on "failure in leadership from the brigade commander on down, lack of discipline, no training whatsoever, and no supervision." Yet anyone with half a brain knows that shoving a flashlight up a man's anus as he howls in agony is torture. You shouldn't need instruction in the intricacies of the Geneva Conventions to figure that out.

Ted Rall

Ted Rall is the author of Wake Up, You're Liberal!: How We Can Take America Back From the Right.

Animal Control
This Week's Scorecard

Athens-Clarke County Animal Control responded to 68 calls.
7 complaints of animal cruelty
2 bite cases
2 complaints of barking dogs
4 citations for ordinance violations
38 animals impounded
32 dogs
2 cats
1 black rat snake
1 copperhead
1 bird
1 squirrel
12 dogs placed
5 adopted
6 reclaimed
1 turned over to another agency

ACC Animal Control press release for the week of May 6 to May 12.