About Flagpole. (Athens, Ga.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (May 25, 2011)
WE ACCEPT BULLDOG BUCKS! Five Points - Athens V1225 S Milledge Ave 706.548.7225 Half-mooN OUTFITTERS www.halfmoonoutfitters.com ATHENS NEWS AND VIEWS Once More into the Breach?: Those of you who aren't too burned out or disillusioned to care about the Classic Center expansion will want to be aware that the Athens-Clarke County Mayor and Commission will hold a special work session at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, May 26 in the planning auditorium at 120 W. Dougherty St. to review the architects' final schematic design for the project The M&C will consider input received from citizens at a public meeting last week, as well as from a user group composed of government officials, citizen experts and representatives of the Classic Center and the architecture firm, as they decide whether to ask for changes to the current plan. A summary of the proposed design is available on the SPLOST page of the ACC website. One of many design issues sure to be consid ered is that of pedes trian access between Thomas and Foundry along the Washington Street axis, which is currently enabled by a long exterior stair way between the Fire Hall and the theater. Commissioners specifi cally mandated that such access be preserved when they approved the expansion concept plan in April, with some clearly stating that if the design didn't meet their standards, they wouldn't vote to approve it. Well, the plan submitted by the Classic Center's architects calls for a pedestrian route right through a large atrium to be built around and behind the Fire Hall—or through adjacent hallways when the atrium is in use—which would place that "public" access firmly under the control of... the Classic Center. Paul Cramer, the center's executive director, says he's "committed" to puviding that access, and he thinks it can be facilitated "24/7." It remains to be seen whether that's what the commis sioners had in mind, and if not, whether they're willing to do anything about it. It Takes You: At its May 26 Community Conversation, Whatever It Takes Athens will present a draft of proposed solutions based on a detailed assessment of community issues pertaining to its mission of ensuring that every child in ACC is on track to complete a post-secondary education by July 1, 2020. This is a big part of WIT's preparations for the implementation of that enormously ambitious plan, and it's critically important that citi zens give their input. The meeting is from 5-6:30 p.m. at the Classic City High School, 440 Dealing Ext., #1. You can find out more at www.witathens.org; if you can't attend, you can still contribute by sending your ideas to comments@witathens.org. Dave Marr news@flagpole.com The proposed design for the Classic Center expansion features a large atrium that would be built around three sides of the Fire Hall (seen here in a cutaway view from the Foundry Street side). TPmtnjTfejmsTfr Tfa’s Krazy Korner My new theory: Congressman Broun is working on a time machine. Last week’s opinion piece by Broun in the Augusta Chronicle offered an inspiring vision of an energy-independent America, but there’s a big problem: there’s not nearly enough petro leum underneath the North American continent to make his plan work. In the op-ed, Broun uses an estimate of 163 billion barrels of recoverable oil, but that number is pretty much impossible to verify using Interior Department geological estimates. That’s where the time machine—and Broun's big-game hunting skills—come into play. He must be traveling back 65 million years or so, corralling dinosaurs into what would become the U.S. outer continental shelf and Northern Alaska and then gunning them down in huge piles. Otherwise, !'m not sure how Broun figures there to be so much petroleum there. But, there’s another problem that effectively renders the first one moot. Anyone who knows how the free market works understands that the barrel price is determined by global supply. That is, a ton more oil found tomorrow off our coast won’t mean cheaper gas for Americans. Oil drilled in the United States goes directly onto the international market. Plus, it takes a long time to get oil online; from discovery to gas tank takes at least five years. Phyllis Martin, a senior analyst at the Department of Energy, points out that by 2030, the U.S. output will represent merely 1 percent of the projected global consumption. -Even if we were to have all the oil Broun imagines, this number would move up only slightly, and. again, that oil would simply be on the international mar ket, where increased consumption in China and India will likely negate any boons in supply. Broun’s plan just doesn’t make much sense. If he does have a time machine, Broun should go to the future to see how mankind is going to move past oil, instead of inventing stories that prop up his oil industry friends’ profits. (Matthew Pulver] 4 FLAGPOLE.COM-MAY25, 2011 SMALLWOOD, REYNOLDS. STEWART, STEWART & ASSOC
