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Who’s Doing the Envisioning?
PLUS, CREATURE COMFORTS ON CHASE, BROOKLYN CEMETERY AND MORE LOCAL NEWS
By Blake Aued and Martha Michael news@flagpole.com
Envision Athens describes itself as “a com
munity-wide effort to develop a common
vision for the future of the Athens-Clarke
County community.” That’s a laudable goal,
but it’s not off to an auspicious start.
Envision Athens grew out of the every-
decade update of the city’s state-required
comprehensive plan, a document that
focuses on planning and zoning but also
touches on related areas like transporta
tion and economic development. The last
comp-plan update in 2007 resulted in few
changes to the document, which encourages
urban growth and discourages sprawl; a
couple of years later, the unpopular luxury-
student-housing and intown-McMansion
booms that are changing the face of the city
started, so this is something folks might
want to pay attention to.
The 2007 update under Mayor Heidi
Davison was an open and transparent pro
cess. Anyone who wanted to could jump in
and get their hands dirty, and hundreds did.
Envision Athens has the look of a more
top-down process. An initial group of
20—including ACC, the Clarke County
School District, UGA, Athens Tech, the
Athens Housing Authority, local hospitals,
the City of Winterville, United Way and
the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce—
tapped 18 others to form a 38-member
steering committee.
You can find the full steering committee
membership at envisionathens.com. What
you won’t find though, are the myriad (and,
frankly, bewildering) stakeholder groups
and focus groups that will also be meeting
throughout the year to craft this plan.
At a meeting with Athens-Clarke
Heritage Foundation members last week,
co-chairwoman Sharyn Dickerson, an ACC
commissioner, faced a skeptical audience.
Envision Athens’ rollout has been rushed
and haphazard, attendees said, with too
little information about who is behind it
and how they were chosen. “It seems like a
core group that picked another core group,”
said Rosemary Goodrum.
“We couldn’t put out a call,” Dickerson
replied. “Lord knows we’d get 10,000
people. We tried to find out through the
network who was involved.”
Although the steering committee is
diverse in gender and race, Dickerson’s fel
low Commissioner Melissa Link has been
raising questions about its geographical
makeup, contending that neighborhoods
in her central Athens district that are most
likely to be affected by development in the
coming decade aren’t well represented.
“There is a lot of concern in the commu
nity that a lot of this is happening behind
closed doors,” Link said. Dickerson declined
to say whom the steering committee has
invited to participate in the focus groups,
and seemed to imply that their names
wouldn’t be made public, nor would their
meetings be open to the public. “This is a
public-private partnership, not the govern
ment, so there’s no right that we have to
put everything out there,” Dickerson said.
Jeb Bradberry, who sits on an ACC board
that hears property-tax appeals, challenged
her. “If there’s public funding involved,
those meetings have to be open,” he said.
Dickerson later clarified that the steering
committee wants to get permission from
focus-group participants before posting
their names, and that their meetings will be
open, but not for public comment.
Link also expressed concern that urban
growth—the city’s most pressing planning
issue, from her point of view—will get
short shrift. Athens Land Trust President
Heather Benham assured her that it will be
considered, but the steering committee is
also trying to ensure that voices are heard
from groups that don’t always step forward.
None of this will matter if the Envision
Athens plan meets the same fate as every
other plan in Athens—a dusty shelf. That
was Chris Evans’ fear: “We study like crazy,
and we spend so much money on studies.”
He wondered, how will all those studies be
pulled together?
“You have every reason to feel jaded
about this,” Dickerson said. But this plan is
different, she insisted.
Envision Athens has scheduled five pub
lic forums to take public input at varying
times so everyone can attend regardless
of their work schedule: Monday, Jan. 30
at 6 p.m. at the Classic Center; Tuesday,
Jan. 31 at 12:30 p.m. at the Lyndon House
and 6 p.m. at Cedar Shoals High School;
Wednesday, Feb. 1 at 10:30 a.m. at the
Classic Center; and Thursday, Feb. 2 at 6
p.m. at Clarke Central High School.
There will be two more rounds of public
hearings, in April and June, before the final
plan is released in October. [Blake Aued]
A Little More Comfortable
Creature Comforts will renovate part of
an old mill off Chase Street just north of
Boulevard into an $8 million new brewery
slated to open this fall, with tours starting
in early 2018.
The Athens-Clarke County Commission
unanimously approved a $475,000 tax
payer contribution to the project at a called
meeting Jan. 17. The county Industrial
Development Authority will use the money
to buy brewing equipment that it will lease
to Creature Comforts for a nominal fee for
five years, after which Creature Comforts
will own the equipment. Creature Comforts
will hire 25 full-time employees earning
an average annual wage of $34,000 and 11
part-time employees to staff the new brew
ery. The deal with ACC includes a clawback
provision.
“This is an Athens company, and we
want to keep those expansions here,” ACC
Manager Blaine Williams said.
In return, the company agreed to make
the capital investment to renovate part of
the vacant Southern Mill, a Bryan Street
denim factory that closed in the 1990s.
Other parts of the property are slated to
become a residential development with
commercial space and art studios, although
the project has made little apparent prog
ress since winning ACC approval more than
a year ago.
Link said she hopes Creature Comforts
coming in will jump-start the rest of the
project and others like it in the industrial
area between Boulevard and the Loop. “This
is a corridor that has a lot of potential for
small-business growth,” she said.
It will take seven years’ worth of tax
revenue to earn back the $475,000 ACC is
spending, Williams said. In the meantime,
though, the school district will be reaping
a windfall, and the county as a whole will
benefit from the investment in the mill and
the jobs created, Williams said.
This is not as cut-and-dried a win-win
as county officials would have you believe,
though. As more than one wag has pointed
out, ACC essentially wrote a check for
half a million dollars to Wes Rogers, the
student-housing developer who’s one of the
Artist Harold Rittenberry unveils a gate he designed for Brooklyn Cemetery.
6 FLAGPOLE.COM | JANUARY 25, 2017
company’s major investors. And a whole
lot of local business owners woke up last
Wednesday morning wondering if they
could get the local government to subsidize
their businesses by, as Creature Comforts
did, looking at sites in other states.
This is not unprecedented. If you’ll
recall, a couple of years ago, Terrapin had
a $300,000 offer from ACC to expand its
Newton Bridge Road brewery, but has
since been sold to international conglom
erate MillerCoors and started work on a
second brewery at the new Braves stadium
in Smyrna. That deal is now off the table,
according to Mayor Nancy Denson. The
Kroger on U.S. 29 received tax breaks, and
so would have the new Hyatt Place down
town if not for public outcry. ACC taxpayers
spent $6 million in cash on Caterpillar. The
Athens Downtown Development Authority
regularly pays downtown property owners
to fix up their own buildings.
Taxpayer handouts to private businesses
always make me a little queasy, and I don’t
like it when government plays favorites.
On the other hand, Creature Comforts
makes great beer, brings a lot of publicity
and tourists to Athens and does a lot of
of good for the community (raising more
than $100,000 for charity, for example). If a
sweetheart deal is what it takes to get them
to stay and help them grow, so be it. [BA]
More Commission News
At the same called meeting, the commis
sion ratified Mayor Nancy Denson’s choice
for municipal court judge, Ryan Hope, the
county’s chief assistant solicitor (misde
meanor prosecutor) since 2007. Prior to
that he spent six years as a public defender.
Hope replaces Leslie Spornberger Jones,
who resigned in November, on Feb. 6.
The commission’s regularly scheduled
agenda-setting meeting followed the called
voting, and most of the items on the rather
sparse agenda look set to sail through Feb.
7. They include:
• A new drought management plan, part of
which involves potentially building a res
ervoir to collect treated sewage for indus
trial use or reprocessing it into drinking
water in the event of a severe drought.
“We use less water [per capita] than any
county in the state, so we are not going
to make it through the next 100-year
drought through conservation, in all like
lihood, depending on how long it lasts,”
Commissioner Jerry NeSmith said.
• A long-range plan to build out the county’s
network of greenways and trails, in spite
of some quibbling about the order in
which they’ll be built.
• New regulations on infill development
designed to limit overly large new houses
that loom over more modest neighbor
ing homes. The new rules will only apply
to neighborhoods zoned single-family,
though. Link again raised the issue of
protecting neighborhoods that are pri
marily single-family but zoned multi
family, such as the Hancock Corridor.
“When folks can’t build the largest dream
home they can in Normaltown, they’ll
head over to Hancock,” she said. “There’s
definitely a domino effect that could hap
pen here.” She called for a new zoning
classification or overlay district for those
neighborhoods.
One item that could get a second
look is a proposal to raise Clarke County