Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

SEE PAGE IB SEE PAGE 12A Lady Eagles Soccer Squad Wins 2 Games CMS 8th Grade Reading Scores Are Up Again Vol. 131 No. 6 24 Pages 2 Sections The www.CommerceNewsTODAY.com ine Commerce News 50 Cents COVERING THE COMMERCE AREA SINCE 1875 Wednesday MARCH 25, 2009 Stonewall's Is Moving To Braselton Commerce’s loss is Braselton’s gain. In what he described as “a tough business decision,” owner Ronnie Jones is relo cating Stonewalls BBQ to Braselton. The restaurant’s last day will be Friday. It will open in a strip shopping center at 6702 Hwy. 53, Braselton, Monday, April 6. The original plan, said Jones, was to run restau rants in both locations. “Two weeks ago, this was a ‘growing decision,’” he said. The plan was to acquire the equipment left when Hickory Wind BBQ closed, but that changed when the owner sold it to someone else. “When the equipment fell through, we had to make a decision,” Jones said. “This wasn’t a decision that came lightly to us.” Contributing to the deci sion were the upcoming expiration of his lease on South Broad Street and the pending renewal of his per mit from the Department of Please Turn to Page 5A mmm THURSDAY, MARCH 26 Thundershowers: Low, 56; high, 65; 90% chance rain FRIDAY, MARCH 27 Thundershowers: Low, 56; high, 69; 40% chance rain SATURDAY, MARCH 28 Scattered showers: Low, 48; high, 73; 40% chance rain SUNDAY, MARCH 29 Partly cloudy: Low, 42; high, 66; 40% chance rain Precipitation this month 3.78 inches Precipitation This Year 11.01 Inches INDEX Church News 4B Classified Ads ...101 2B Calendar 3A Crime News 7-8A News Roundup 2A Obituaries 6-7B Opinions 4-5A School News .... 1 1-1 2A Sports 1-3B Social News 10A Spring—At Last Thrift, blooming in a Lewis Circle yard. Photos by Mark Beardsley Spring's Beauty Brings Fresh And Welcome Color Winter gave way to spring last Friday, just in time for a glorious weekend that — hopefully — portends an abundance of warm and beautiful days. The daffodils, a late winter harbringer of change, are fading, but nature is pro ducing a huge array of colorful buds and blossoms to stir the gardener’s heart. One need not travel to find the evi dence of spring’s arrival. From thrift to henbit, flowering cherry trees to dog woods (just now starting to bloom), the ladscape is ablaze with color. There is no recession in nature. Enjoy it. The weather forecast for the rest of this week calls for rain. A honeybee visits a flowering cherry tree near the intersection of Washington Street and Jefferson Road. A maple tree blooms at Commerce High School on Lakeview Drive. Daffodils in a Woodland Trail yard. Yellowbells (forsythia) at Willoughby Park on Clayton Street. City Seeking Deep Cuts In Operations Revenue Projections Lead City To Propose 15% Cuts In Operations By Mark Beardsley Don’t look for anything new out of Commerce’s gov ernment next fiscal year. Facing declining revenues related to plant closings and cutbacks, the 2009-10 city budget will be the lean est since 1990, reports city manager Clarence Bryant. “The budget we’ll do this year will be very similar to the one we did in 1990,” Bryant said. “We’ll sit back and wait for the telephone to right, and go out and fix it. It won’t be that extreme, but we’re looking for it to be very close to it.” The budget process has just started. It will wind up in early July when a final version—including numbers from the last month of this fiscal year — is approved. The early goal was to shave 15 percent from the opera tions cost of most depart ments. For the utilities, that means no capital expendi tures and little maintenance other than what is absolute ly necessary or required by law. That doesn’t mean a 15 per cent cut in the utility depart ments’ budgets. That’s not possible, given that so much of the expenses are tied up in buying gas or electricity. Nor is it possible to trim all budgets by that amount. “Some departments can do it and some can’t,” Bryant explained. “Some, if they do, are going to have to cut services.” “We’re trying to do every thing we can do to keep the level of service at the same rate and the level of employ ment at the same Please Turn to Page 3A Judge Booth Hears Motion To Toss Bear Creek Lawsuit By Mark Beardsley Superior Court Judge Joe Booth will decide whether Jackson County’s lawsuit against the Upper Oconee Basin Water Authority should proceed. The county is suing the authority — of which it is a member — to force it to recalculate the yield of the Bear Creek Reservoir, which the authority man ages, under the belief that the lake’s actual capacity is less than half what the authority claims. Should Jackson County prevail, all assumptions upon which Athens-Clarke, Barrow, Oconee — and Jackson — counties use the water will be null and void. That has huge financial ramifications, particularly for Barrow and Athens-Clarke. Booth listened to argu ments last Wednesday on a motion by the authority to dismiss the suit. He did not indicate when the parties can expect a decision. Andrew Ekonomou of the Atlanta law firm Ekonomou, Atkinson & Lambros LLC argued that the author ity has sovereign immunity and that Georgia law did not allow Mike Bowers declaratory judgment as requested in the suit. Former Georgia Attorney General Mike Bowers of the Atlanta law firm Balch & Bingham LLP countered those arguments on behalf of Jackson County and its water and sewerage author ity. At stake is how much water each of the counties can count on each day during the 50-year term of the inter governmental agreement that created the authority and allowed for the building of the reservoir. The current “established yield” of 58 mil lion gallons a day (mgd) is the basis not just for water use projections among the four owners, but also of Please Turn to Page 3A 'Unseasonably Healthy' February Not Good For BJC By Mark Beardsley Only at a hospital would the absence of a flu season be received as bad news. But an “unseasonably healthy” February resulted in BJC Medical Center finishing the month about $65,000 in the red after a January in which the facility was $19,000 in the black. January’s small “profit” was considered important as it came in the wake of a large layoff of hospital personnel because of the economy. A return to red ink in February was a bit of a surprise. “March has rebounded. We hope February was an anomaly,” commented Ray Leadbetter, BJC’s chief financial officer. “The flu vaccine is too effective,” joked CEO Jim Yarborough. Leadbetter, after the January numbers, had pre dicted that the facility would wind up its fiscal year June 30 $759,000 in the red. It was $ 1 million in the red for the first six months of the fiscal year.