If you’ve attended a planning commission meeting, chances are you saw Lucy Rowland sitting behind a table next to her fellow commissioners.
She was the slight, serious-looking woman with shoulder-length brown (now mostly gray) hair. She would listen intently to residents wanting zoning changes, to homeowners complaining about irate neighbors, and to three-piece-suited developers demanding variances. She might have asked a pertinent question of the chair or of Planning Director Brad Griffith, but mostly, she listened.
Now, her 35 years as a volunteer commissioner have come to an end. “I decided I’m taking some time off,” she said. “Someone else can do it.”
Planning commission member Alice Kinman said she’ll miss Rowland, who “not only does her homework, but also generally has a font of knowledge. She knows about planning and design and has deep institutional knowledge. She’s just a very natural leader on the board, whether she’s chairing us or not.”
But for Rowland, there’ll be no more contentious meetings, no more reading reams of documents or doing research. Things have changed in the past few years: Athens-Clarke County commissioners seem to dismiss recommendations more often from both the planning commission and the professional staff. People are ruder during public meetings. During her years of service, Rowland periodically served as chair—and occasionally gaveled out-of-order speakers into silence.
“Brad said I really could bang that gavel,” she said with a laugh. “I didn’t like people breaking rules and trying to disrupt a meeting.”
What do you expect from a librarian? Librarians like order. Rowland is a retired librarian. She came to Athens with her first husband, a bachelor of science degree in zoology and a master’s degree in microbiology from Virginia Tech. While her husband was in graduate school, she did research with bacteriologists in the UGA vet school and later with professor Ivan Roth before moving to the Science Library in 1975. Later, she moved to College Park, MD, to study library science. Armed with another degree, she accepted a job in the Science Library at UGA in 1980. The husband stayed in Texas.
Now retired, librarian Bill Loughner worked with Rowland, suffering together under a micromanaging boss. “Lucy learned how to handle those situations, and she eventually became my boss,” he said. “It worked out fine, I enjoyed working with her. If you were doing your job, she wasn’t going to hassle you.”
The third of four daughters, Rowland grew up in Alexandria, VA, where her father worked in naval intelligence and her mother took care of the family after a career at the National Archives. Her dad became an expert in aerial photography—he was among intelligence specialists who spotted the Soviet missile silos in Cuba in 1962—and joined the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1961. She remembers hearing him talk in “spook speak” on the phone.
Her mother’s ancestors had come from England with William Penn, so Rowland and her sisters were reared as members of the Society of Friends. In Alexandria, then going by her maiden name of Lucy Minogue, she lived in a neighborhood filled with families whose parents were civil servants. She went to high school with director David Lynch and Jack Fisk, Sissy Spacek’s husband. Other community residents included singers Mama Cass Elliot and Jim Morrison, and Gus King, now Sen. Angus King of Maine.
“David was artsy, and kind of out there,” she said. “While everybody else was wearing white socks, he wore red ones. I think he really enjoyed being different.”
In the late 1980s, before unification, city council member Kathy Hoard asked Athens native Charlie Rowland, who owned antique stores, to run for the council, and Lucy to help him. “He wanted to be elected, but he didn’t want to do the work to get elected,” Lucy said. But they bonded over the campaign, and in the fall of 1986, they were married.
Two years later, Athens Mayor Dwain Chambers asked Lucy to serve on the planning commission. In the pre-unification days of the 1980s, the commission had 10 members, five appointed by the mayor and five by the county commission. She was the only woman, a situation that didn’t bother her—there had been very few women at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, as it was called when she graduated.
With Charlie, she moved to the family property called Beech Haven. In 1910, businessman Charles Rowland II, Charlie’s grandfather, bought 210 acres on the river. Grandmother Essie Hampton Rowland designed the summer house in the arts and crafts style, and grandfather Charles planned the many ponds, bridges, trails and gardens. Capt. John Barnett, then the Athens city engineer, oversaw the construction, undertaken by carpenter Jim Glenn and stonemason Mike Osborne.
Each of the couple’s five children inherited a piece of the original property, which was divided by Atlanta Highway in the 1930s. The county has bought some of the remaining acreage for a nature park. During a recent planning commission meeting, at which Rowland relatives spoke against a proposed rezoning, Lucy Rowland recused herself from voting.
In the 1990s, the couple moved from Beech Haven—“It was like living in the country, in town,” Rowland said—to a historic home in Five Points, close enough for Rowland to walk to the science library and Charlie to his antiques shop on Lumpkin Street. He developed lung cancer in 2005 and died in 2006. Rowland retired from the science library and the College of Veterinary Medicine in 2010, but then organized the Louis T. Griffith Library for the Georgia Museum of Art, where she currently volunteers as director.
She may have left the planning commission, but she’s not abandoning planning. In the early 1990s, the planning commission paid for members to attend the American Planning Association (APA) conference in Atlanta. Rowland was smitten. In 1992, she was chairing the commission and was sent to the APA conference, but after 1992, she paid her own way to numerous other conferences. After attending the APA conference in San Francisco, she returned with an idea that has since been incorporated into planning commission procedure: At the beginning of every meeting, all submitted documents are incorporated into the minutes.
More conferences followed. She joined the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU), where she made friends with renowned architects and planners Andres Duany, John Massengale and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, as well as author Jim Kunstler. A planning commission meeting was scheduled during this year’s CNU conference, so she couldn’t go, but she’s planning to attend next year.
“Lucy has always been so generous with information,” said Griffin, the planning department director. “She would bring back ideas for us from the conferences she attended. And I knew that if I couldn’t remember something exactly, I could always call her.”
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