Oconee County played an outsized role in Mike Collins’ sweeping victory in last week’s runoff for the Republican nomination for the 10th Congressional District.
In the primary on May 24, only 15.0 percent of Oconee County voters using the Republican ballot selected Collins as their preferred candidate in the race for the open U.S. District 10 Congressional seat.
A slightly higher percentage of the county’s voters–17.6 percent–picked Vernon Jones.
The Oconee County Board of Commissioners took the first step on Tuesday night to put a 1 percent Transportation Special Purpose Local Sales Tax referendum on the Nov. 8 ballot.
A portion of the tax would be used to cover transportation projects normally included in the county’s general fund budget, allowing the county to reduce its property tax by 1 mill. The current county millage rate is 6.686.
Deferred Tax LLC has submitted preliminary paperwork for a second attempt to rezone property on the west side of the Oconee Connector between SR 316 and Mars Hill Road for a shopping center that is to include a Publix.
The rezone request includes only a little more than 34 acres of the total 47 acres owned by Deferred Tax and seeks a less intense business classification than sought in the first rezone. The Board of Commissioners rejected that request in May of 2021.
The Georgia Hospital Association and the Georgia Emergency Management Agency reported on Friday that area hospitals had 29 COVID-19 patients, just more than double the 14 reported on Friday of last week.
The number of ICU beds in use was 61, down from 63 a week earlier, and the number of adult ventilators in use was 27, up from 23 a week ago.
In its weekly COVID-19 report, the Georgia Department of Public Health announced that the number of new COVID-19 cases tallied in its electronic tracking system in the Northeast Health District in the week ending on June 22 was 696.
The Oconee Connector and Virgil Langford Road intersections with SR 316, as well as SR 316 itself, will remain open to traffic during reconstruction of the two intersections, scheduled to take place from 2024 to 2027, with one exception.
Eastbound traffic on SR 316 trying to exit onto the Oconee Connector most likely will be required to detour around the intersection for 45 days at some point after reconstruction of that intersection gets underway.
The detour will route eastbound traffic along Jimmy Daniell Road to Virgil Langford Road, where it will be diverted either north or south.
Ryan Hammock soundly defeated Julie Mauck in the runoff Tuesday for the Oconee County Republican Party nomination for Post 3 on the Board of Education.
Hammock won in each of the county’s eight precincts.
He also won in early voting, absentee ballot voting, and election day voting.
His final figure was 57.9 percent to Mauck’s 42.1 percent.
Turnout in early voting makes it likely that a relatively small number of Oconee County voters will have cast a ballot in the party primary runoffs by the end of election day tomorrow.
When early voting ended on Friday, only 2,244 of Oconee County’s 29,155 active voters had cast a ballot.
Another 282 voters had turned in an absentee ballot, bringing to 2,526 the total number of ballots received by the end of the day on Friday, or 8.6 percent of the county’s active voters.
