Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Oconee County Citizen Committee Continues Courthouse Discussion

BOC Must Wait

The Oconee County Board of Commissioners is going to have wait at least a month before it gets a recommendation from its citizen advisory committee on Land Use and Transportation Planning on what to do about the county courthouse.

The committee spent an hour discussing the issue again tonight but ended the meeting with little sense of what it is going to recommend to the BOC.

Early in the meeting, Abe Abouhamdan, chair of the committee, told the group that "next meeting we need to come up with some sort of recommendation."

At the meeting’s end, however, he said the discussion would continue at the Feb. 9 meeting and may go beyond that point.

On March 31 of 2009 the BOC asked the citizen committee for a recommendation on what the county should do to address future space needs for court and administrative functions of the county.

The Land Use and Transportation Planning Committee began discussion of the issue the next month and has devoted most of its monthly meetings since to the issue.

At the meeting tonight, the committee did create a list of four options: (1) Keep all government activities in one place, (2), Separate judicial and administrative activities, (3) Do nothing, and (4), Combine administrative operations with the Oconee County Board of Education.

Abouhamdan asked committee members at the end of the hour-long meeting, held at the Community Center at Veterans Park, to submit to him questions they felt still needed to be addressed at a future meeting or meetings.