Organizers of the Tuesday evening town hall meeting with Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Collins were not able to get Collins to attend, but they did turn out a very large crowd that produced a stack of 163 comment forms to deliver to Collins’ Monroe office this week.
Selected individuals in the auditorium of the Athens-Clarke County Library read aloud a number of those questions, and the crowd remained engaged and orderly for the more than 90 minutes set aside for the meeting.
Four people who had been affected by the massive federal cutbacks ordered by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk led off the program in the absence of Collins.
The first of those, Mark Farmer, a professor in cellular biology at the University of Georgia, set the stage for the evening by listing cuts in federal funding for research at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service in Athens.
“Why are you not doing your job?” Farmer asked Collins, noting that Congress had voted to fund the research being closed down by the executive branch of the government.
State Rep. Spencer Frye, an Athens Democrat who moderated the event, told the absent Collins, “I’m very disappointed in you as an American, as an elected official, and as a Georgian, that you are unwilling to come and speak with your constituents at this time.”
Collins was represented by a red Make American Great Again hat placed on the seat of a chair on the middle of the stage. His image also was projected on the screen behind the chair.
The auditorium has 150 seats, all of which were taken, and at least 40 more people crammed into the room and stood along is rear and aisles, despite requests that they not do so. Two overflow rooms into which the event was live streamed also were filled to capacity, with counts of 66 and 100 in them, and the hallway outside the auditorium was filled. Another 45 people were watching the live streaming remotely, according to event organizers.
For more on this story, with a video of the town hall meeting, please click through to Oconee County Observations.
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