Oconee County planners want the residents south of Athens to begin thinking about what it should look like in the future.

As reported in the Athens Banner-Herald, the county has begun the process of updating its state-mandated “Joint Comprehensive Plan” for the county and its four towns, Bishop, Bogart, North High Shoals and Watkinsville, Oconee County Planning Director B.R. White told Oconee County Commissioners last week.

The state requires updated plans to be eligible for state grant, assistance and permitting programs.

State rules also require public involvement in the planning, which includes the appointment of a “stakeholders” committee to represent major interest groups in the county.

Oconee’s new county commission will appoint the group of about 20 to 25 people, said outgoing county commission chairman Melvin Davis. The process also includes public meetings over the course of several months designed to give other citizens a chance to participate in the planning process, he said.

The plans are intended to guide the county’s development. The county’s existing plan, adopted in 2007, has a distinct difference in development goals for the county’s northern and southern areas.

The 2007 plan’s aim was to keep development to the northern part of the county, near Athens and fast-growing Barrow and Walton counties, and leave most of the rest of the county rural and agricultural. The rural aspect is the reason many Oconee residents live there, and why in 2006 Progressive Farmer named Oconee County one of the three best rural counties to live in.

Sustaining that rural feel may be challenging because Oconee County nearly tripled in population, from 12,427 to 32,808, between 1980 and 2010. If the county continues to grow at this pace, its population in 2040 will be at nearly 87,000, which is comparable to the size of Clarke County in 1990.

Aside from population, developers backed with state and federal financial incentives hope to install one of the state’s largest solar farms on more than 200 farmland acres near Bogart, but the plan is heavily opposed by area residents around the intersection of Dials Mill and McNutt Creek roads. This area is becoming more residential, and Oconee’s zoning and land-use rules weren’t drawn up with such installations in mind.

Water issues are also increasingly coming up in the county as its road and sewage treatment systems grow along with county’s population and commercial sector.

A planned four-lane and bypass of U.S. Highway 441 around Bishop could affect several streams, for example, while homeowners with land on Calls Creek have organized to fight the county’s planned gravity-fed sewer line down the creek.
 

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​There seems to be a significant amount of interest among locals for commercial air service in Athens, and airport officials have had some interest from prospective carriers that have been eyeing Athens-Ben Epps Airport, an airport official told Athens-Clarke County’s mayor and commissioners.

As reported in the Athens Banner-Herald, Athens-Ben Epps Airport Authority member Beth Higgins didn’t tell the mayor and commission at their Thursday public work session which airlines were looking at Athens, citing concerns about revealing details prematurely.

Higgins said there is evidence the Athens airport could attract a substantial number of commercial passengers, if they could easily get to top destinations found in a 2014 study of the airline market in Athens-Clarke, Oconee and parts of eight surrounding counties within a 40-minute drive of Athens-Ben Epps Airport.

According to the Sixel Consulting Group study, the top five destinations for local passengers are, according to 2013 numbers on ticketed passengers, New York, Washington, D.C., South Florida, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Currently, air carriers serving Athens have mostly flown to Charlotte, where local passengers could transfer to flights to their final destinations. For a short time, service to Atlanta was available, but the last air carrier to serve Athens, the now-defunct SeaPort Airlines, offered service to Nashville.

There are several challenges in bringing sustained commercial air service to Athens, Higgins said in a briefing delivered at the mayor and commission’s non-voting work session. One problem is that smaller airlines interested in serving Athens are “few and far between.”

Major airlines, the so-called “legacy carriers” like Delta, are not much interested in serving short routes, Mayor Nancy Denson and the commissioners learned Thursday. Large airlines have been phasing out the propeller-driven aircraft that have traditionally served shorter routes.

In making the transition to all-jet fleets, airlines have discovered that 50-seat jets are expensive to operate, so they have moved to jets that can carry from 70 to 100 passengers. At that point, though, there is no operational efficiency for the airlines in serving markets like Athens.

Among the strategies that might be helpful in bringing commercial air service to Athens would be tax incentives, airport incentives like landing-fee waivers, “ticket banks” in which larger local institutions purchase tickets in advance and allocate them as needed to their travelers, and revenue guarantees to airlines that could be funded through a federal Small Community Air Service Development Grant.

Higgins and the rest of the Airline Committee, along with Airport Director Tim Beggerly, approached the mayor and commission about considering allocating $65,000 in the upcoming fiscal year to air service development, with $25,000 for marketing Athens and the airport, $20,000 for consultant services, and another $20,000 for recruiting a commercial air carrier.

Commissioner Kelly Girtz had the most hard-eyed assessment of commercial air service recruitment efforts. If further efforts toward attracting commercial air service reveal that Athens isn’t in “that sweet spot” for attracting sustainable commercial service, Girtz said, the county might want to consider some sort of transit option linking Athens to the Atlanta airport. At least one private shuttle service already operates between Athens and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

During Thursday’s presentation, Higgins said she is optimistic that some air carriers will find a way to offer service from places like Athens to popular destinations.

​“There’s got to be a business model out there, and some entrepreneur is going to come into these small airports,” she said.

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As reported in The Athens Banner-Herald, a block of West Rutherford Street between Stanton Way and Mount Vernon Place west of South Milledge Avenue in the Five Points neighborhood was named Athens-Clarke County’s 11th designated historic district.

After over a year of the Athens-Clarke County Historic Preservation Commission requesting that the county government review a potential local historic designation for the block, Athens-Clarke County commissioners recently approved it.

The new West Rutherford Street Historic District, which includes 15 parcels spanning 6.5 acres, is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places-designated West Cloverhurst / Springdale Historic District.

The local designation means that any exterior changes planned for structures within the new historic district must be issued a “certificate of appropriateness” after a review is conducted by the Historic Preservation Commission.

There is also a tax advantage for property owners in a neighborhood that carries both a national and a local historic designation. According to Amy Kissane, executive director of the Athens-Clarke Heritage Foundation, they are entitled to have their property assessment frozen for eight years, which offers some protection against rising property taxes, particularly if the rate at which property is taxed does not change appreciably during that time.

Athens-Clarke County Commissioner Mike Hamby told the newspaper that the neighborhood decided to pursue the designation after a demolition permit was filed for a residential structure as the first step in a proposal that Hamby said would have “changed the character of the neighborhood.”

According to a report presented to the mayor and commission prior to their Dec. 6 decision, the area was one of the first residential subdivisions in Athens having appeared on an 1891 document titled “Map of Cloverhurst Farm.”

Aside from its early layout as a subdivision-style street, the West Rutherford Historic District carries the local designation based on the character of the homes which were constructed between 1930 and 1956.

The local historic designation for the West Rutherford Street Historic District was moving forward as county residents and officials, notably in intown neighborhoods like Five Points where the new district is located, were becoming concerned about infill development, or new construction on vacant lots or renovation of underutilized lots which can be developed out of scale and style with the surrounding neighborhood.

​As a result, county planners advised that establishing historic districts could control infill development, but a final set of recommendations to county officials concentrated most heavily on limiting the size of a new residential development or significant renovation of existing homes.
 
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As reported in the Athens Banner-Herald, the University System of Georgia is making headway in increasing college graduation rates and keeping college affordable, the man who is set to become the university system’s top administrator told legislators Monday.

“The two really go hand in hand,” Steve Wrigley, who becomes the University System of Georgia’s chancellor on Jan. 1, told the paper.

Wrigley was a featured speaker at the University of Georgia’s Georgia Center for Continuing Education for the Biennial Institute for Georgia Legislators, which is held every two years after fall elections to give legislators education and training in the legislative process and in the issues coming up before the legislature convenes in January.

An interim chancellor since August, when Chancellor Hank Huckaby announced his retirement effective Dec. 31, Wrigley has been executive vice chancellor of administration for the University System of Georgia for over five years. Prior to that, he was senior vice president for external relations at the University of Georgia and chief of staff for former Georgia Gov. Zell Miller.

In 2012, Gov. Nathan Deal’s “Complete College Georgia” initiative set a goal of 60 percent of Georgia’s workforce having post-secondary education including technical school. Since only 47 percent do, the university system must increase the number of graduates by about 3 percent a year, he said.

The system has about 321,000 students, and about 62,000 graduated this year, up 14 percent from five years ago, he said.

The system is using several strategies to reduce the time students need to complete their degrees, Wrigley said.

He also said that a change in how colleges are teaching remedial skills to students has shown great promise in five pilot programs. Instead of special courses in remedial math or English, students who need remedial help enroll in regular classes, but get special tutoring over the course of a semester.

This fall, students in the university system could take 6,200 online undergraduate courses, up from 1,500 six years ago, he said.

The system is also saving students millions of dollars in textbook costs with a program that offers students in many courses free digital textbooks, he said.

He also noted the state Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s public colleges, did not raise tuition this year. The system is also saving millions of dollars by merging colleges. Five years ago, the University System of Georgia counted 35 institutions of higher education; as of Friday, when Darton State College and Albany State University merge, that number will be 28, he said.

“They (students) need to be prepared to work, but they also need to be educated citizens who strengthen democracy,” he said.

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