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LEGISLATORS RETURN TO ATLANTA
WHY DIDN’T WALMART COME TO DOWNTOWN?
The circus returns to Atlanta next week
when Georgia's legislators convene the 2013
session of the General Assembly. You can
expect some fussing and fighting among the
lawmakers, but it will seem quiet when com
pared to the war being fought in Washington
over debt ceilings and spending issues. There
is a good reason for that. There's a real two-
party system at work in Congress, so you've
always got enough members in the minor
ity party to keep the majority party busy. In
Georgia, we've operated through a one-party
system of politics. For a long time it was con
trolled by the Democratic Party, but for the
last decade the Republicans have been in
charge and hold nearly two-thirds of
the seats in the Legislature.
With that kind of control, it's
only natural that things should
run more quietly. It should be
a quieter session for sure in
the Georgia Senate, which was
divided by a power struggle for
the past two years between Lt.
Gov. Casey Cagle and a faction
headed by President Pro Tern Tommie
Williams (R-Lyons) and Majority Leader
Chip Rogers (R-Woodstock). Williams stepped
down from the pro tern post, and Rogers left
the Senate entirely to accept a state job. With
a new leadership team running the Senate's
Republican caucus, Cagle should regain some
of the power he lost the past two years.
You'll hear a lot of talk about the need to
clean up legislative ethics by putting a limit
on the amount of money lobbyists can spend
for free meals and drinks for lawmakers. A bill
could actually be passed to rein in the lobby
ists, but it's hard to believe that legislators
are going to derail that particular gravy train.
Immigration has been an issue that has
sparked a lot of debate over the past few
years, but that one may recede in importance.
There won't be any major expansions of the
immigration control law (HB 87) that was
passed in 2011 as the debate over immigra
tion reform shifts to the federal level.
If anything, legislators could pull back on
the provision in FIB 87 that requires business
owners and professionals to submit documen
tation proving their citizenship when they
renew their business or occupational licenses.
That part of FIB 87 had some unintended
consequences for people like Secretary of
State Brian Kemp and Insurance Commissioner
Ralph Fludgens, whose offices issue thousands
of licenses each year. The immigration law has
slowed down that process.
"This took an automated process and made
it manual," Kemp said. "This has resulted in
five times longer wait times for renewals and
greatly increased the workload of the
Professional Licensing Board Division
during already strained budget
conditions."
Bills have already been intro
duced to roll back that part
of FIB 87, so that once you've
documented your citizenship, you
don't have to keep proving you
are a citizen every year at license
renewal time.
If there are any loud arguments in
this session, they likely will involve the
extension of a Medicaid provider fee that the
state's hospitals have paid since 2010. If that
fee is not renewed by the General Assembly,
it will blow a $400 million hole in a Medicaid
program that is already facing financial prob
lems. That in turn could force small rural hos
pitals around the state to close.
Some of the more conservative lawmakers
may try to pass a "personhood" amendment
that confers full legal rights on fetuses at the
instant of conception. This is a favorite tactic
of activists who want to make abortions ille
gal. Flouse Speaker David Ralston has already
been sending signals that he doesn't want to
deal with these kinds of social issues this ses
sion, which could put the lid on any discus
sion about it. That's one more reason to think
this will be a quiet session for lawmakers.
There may be no new Walmart in Athens,
but that doesn't mean other communities have
been so lucky.
According to a story in the Decatur Metro,
Selig Enterprises recently received all the
necessary permits to begin building a Walmart
there. It's an interesting contrast to the recent
statement Selig Senior Vice President Jo Ann
Chitty made to Flagpole: "It wasn't specifically
about Athens. There was a corporate decision
to suspend [urban store building] because
the stores weren't performing the way they
wanted them to." But Decatur is hardly alone:
Plenty of communities are undergoing the
same sorts of battles that we endured locally
last year, against Walmarts large and small.
Walmart's urban strategy continues
unabated and is even accelerat
ing. An October story from Wall
Street Journal affiliate Marketwatch
reports that the mega-retailer
plans to open 500 of the urban
stores by 2016. Hardly the suspen
sion Chitty pointed to.
If Selig's claims don't stand up,
how else can we resolve Walmart's
withdrawal? Maybe Selig and
Walmart realized what Athenians
had been saying the whole time—
that it was a bad design? Or maybe
it was the national media blitz that
culminated in Patterson Flood and
the Downtown 13's well-circulated
music video? Rumors last sum
mer suggested that Flood and the
gang did indeed get some airplay
in Walmart's headquarters of
Bentonville, AK, making downtown
Athens less appealing than other
communities where urban Walmarts
could be built first. Spokesmen
were noncommittal throughout the
process and, reportedly, the com
pany tabled the downtown Athens
store before ultimately rejecting
it. Of course, Selig wouldn't offer
a sportsmanlike congratulations
to the Athens musicians for a
PR battle well-fought, certainly not halfway
through the game. Selig's still got a few his
toric structures it needs permission to knock
down, after all.
All the places that are invoked in the
music video for the protest song, "After It's
Gone," are still in as much peril as they ever
were, despite the defeat of Walmart. Local
Main Street businesses are still giving way to
generic apartments and gentrification; bull
dozers are still aimed at Jittery Joe's Roasting
Co., and the Murmur trestle is still being left
to rot. While the sentiment of Flood's song
was appropriate for that moment, providing a
flag to rally around, encouraging Athenians to
hold the line against big business, it misses
the greater power in the unlikely story of
Athens, GA.
The trestle, the roaster and all those other
places have attained their significance primar
ily as representations of the hard work put in
by creative entrepreneurs over the decades,
and while the raw matter of those places may
be in jeopardy, the hard work and creativ
ity that organized that matter is much more
powerful than we give it credit for. Clemson,
SC, Columbia, SC, Auburn, AL, Tuscaloosa,
AL and Knoxville, TN are just a few of a host
of dull college towns in the South, all quite
similar on paper. In fact, some are better than
us on paper, with larger populations, better
infrastructure and more interesting scenery.
So, why is our particular Southern college
town known around the world?
This creative community, through song,
writing, painting, photography and video has
so effectively laid out our intense and unique
visions of this community in ways that put
the cinematically lazy time-lapse (synced up
to generic out-of-town muzak) video released
to promote the downtown master plan to
shame. If "After It's Gone" hinted at a Galt-
esque abandonment of Athens, when there's
no longer a "reason to stay here," what might
happen if the narrative and visionary power of
Athens' creative community were really taken
to heart by local decision-makers?
Kishi Bashi lent a song to Microsoft, and
of Montreal was selling Outback steaks for a
while. Kudos to them. Maybe there's some
thing to their ability to leverage national
attention for commercial purposes. Consider
that, recently, the University of Georgia
quite successfully featured R.E.M.'s "Oh My
Fleart" in a commercial that emphasizes the
emotional connection that people feel to
Athens and UGA, with a chorus triumphantly
declaring that "this place is the beat of my
heart." It's fairly powerful, for a commercial.
Compare that to the Athens Convention and
Visitors Bureau's bulldawgy pun of a slogan
"Life Unleashed." While most university public
service announcements don't generate news
stories, blog buzz and thousands of YouTube
views as the R.E.M. one did.
If an R.E.M song can help convince nostal
gic alumni to whip out their checkbooks and
donate, or tip the decisions of high school
ers about where to enroll—essentially what
to invest in or where to live—what else is
possible? Rather than being voices for hire,
suppose our nationally recognized artists and
musicians used their platform to frame Athens'
future in more interesting terms, to court the
best that might migrate here, rather than fend
off the worst?
Kevan Williams
Tom Crawford tcrawford@gareport.com
THIS W«ILI
ALWAYS
CRASHING
IN THE
SAME
CAR
DECEMBER, 20121 THE NEW SELF
inflicted crisis looms:
THE ARBITRARY DEADLINE IS ALMOST
UPON VS! WE'RE about to So
OVER THE FISCAL CLIFF!
JULY, 20li: A SELF-INFLICTED
CRISIS LOOMS!
C0N6RESS MUST RAISE THE DEBT
CEILING BEFORE THE ARBITRART
DEADLINE—OR THE CONSEQUENCES
WILL BE DIRE!
by TOM TOMORROW
AUGUST 2, 2011: LAST-MINUTE
SETTLEMENT PAVES THE WAY FOR
THE NEXT CRISIS!
THE THREAT OF SEQUESTRATION WILL
FORCE US TO REACH AN AGREE
MENT ON THE BUDGET—
JANUARY 2, 2013: LAST-MINUTE
SETTLEMENT PAVES THE WAY FOR
THE NEXT CRISIS!
POSTPONING THE THREAT OF SE
QUESTRATION WILL BUY US A LITTLE
MORE TIME—
next: more of the same.
we MUST RESOLVE THE DEBT C£ILING|
AND SEQUESTRATION BEFORE THE
NEW DEADLINE—OR ELSE, DIRE!
Patterson Hood and his musical cohorts deserve more credit for
generating publicity against a downtown Walmart.
6 FLAGPOLE.COM-JANUARY 9, 2013
JASON THRASHER