In a surprise move, the Oconee County Board of Commissioners tonight tabled discussion of the controversial Zoom Bait/St. Mary’s sewer line until its March 1 meeting.
The public was given little indication of the reason for the postponement of action other than that issues still needed to be resolved.
Following the meeting, however, Alan Theriault, administrative officer for the county, told me that the county needed to review the size of the sewer pipe for the project, the location of the proposed line, and the cost savings to the county of using gravity feed versus pump stations for its lines.
Theriault’s comments indicate that almost all of the assumptions behind the project now are being reviewed and reconsidered.
The project was first approved by the county more than 20 months ago–on May 26 of 2009–and has increased in cost from $373,422 to $773,000 since then.
It also has changed from a project designed to help two existing businesses on Jennings Mill Road, Zoom Bait and St. Mary’s Health Care System, to a project designed to foster development in the area behind Kohl’s and WalMart on Epps Bridge Parkway.
And it has changed from a project with full BOC support–the vote in May 2009 to go forward with the project was unanimous–to a project pushed by BOC Chairman Melvin Davis but challenged by the other four commissioners.
It also may be that the county will have to negotiate with the Georgia Department of Community Affairs over a $186,711 grant the county received from the state to cover part of the proposed costs for the sewer line.
Work on the sewer line is supposed to be finished by October of this year under the terms of that grant.
According to the agenda for tonight’s meeting, the BOC was supposed to decide whether to request bids for the project, since bids received from an earlier request have expired.
A similar request had been on the agenda of the Jan. 4 meeting, but the BOC delayed action pending further discussion of easements.
Theriault was the one who recommended to the commissioners tonight that they delay action on the sewer project.
Theriault reported to the body that efforts on the part of the county to negotiate with the owners of the 114-acre tract behind Kohl’s and WalMart on terms of easements for the sewer project had failed. The property is owned by the Gordy Family.
The Gordy Family had asked that 50,000 gallons per day of sewer capacity be held for it for five years and that the county pay them $1,000 in legal fees as a condition for granting an easement across their property for the sewer line.
The commissioners were unhappy with the 5-year request, since most property owners only get one year to accept sewage capacity set aside for them.
Theriault also said that County Utility Department Director Chris Thomas late on Friday of last week “received preliminary planning and engineering information dealing with lift station elimination and economic development in the Jimmy Daniel and Epps Bridge commercial corridor.”
He said that he expected by March 1 these issues would be resolved and the Board could decide what to do with the Zoom Bait/St. Mary’s/Gordy sewer project.
The failure of North Georgia Bank on Friday cut deep into the political, commercial and social fabric of Oconee County.
Bank President Charles E. “Chuck” Williams is president of the county’s Industrial Development Authority, having been appointed to that body by the Board of Commissioners.
Kenneth Mann, vice president of the bank, was the 2010 chairman of the Oconee County Chamber of Commerce.
The bank has made contributions to numerous charitable organizations in the county since it opened its doors 11 years ago, including to the Farm-City Tour of the Chamber of Commerce, Watkinsville-based Extra Special People and the Oconee County Senior Center.
While depositors’ funds were transferred intact to BankSouth, which took over North Georgia Bank, the 28 employees are not guaranteed a job, and the bank’s investors could well lose everything.
The bank was founded by Williams and Kenneth Beall, James Bowers Jr., Patricia Ivy, Don Norris, Edwin Thaxton, and Harry B. Thompson, all of whom invested in the bank.
All served on the initial Board of Directors and continued to serve, with one exception, in that capacity until the bank’s closing.
Beall is a landscape architect and land planner who has been involved in most of the major development projects in the county over the last 10 years.
Bowers is a stockbroker and financial advisor.
Ivy is a prominent real estate and development agent and served with Williams on the county’s Development Authority.
Norris, who passed way in 2009, was an insurance adjuster and member of the BOC. He was not replaced on the board of directors.
Thaxton is in real estate and development.
Thompson is an equipment distributor.
North Georgia Bank was owned by North Georgia Bancorp, with Williams as the registered agent and the CEO, according to the Georgia Secretary of State database.
Before opening the bank, Williams and his fellow founders made a public stock offering, and many members of the Oconee County community invested.
Former BOC Chairman Wendell Dawson reported yesterday on his blog, Another Voice from Oconee County, that he was one of them, having invested $5,000 in the bank.
While the bank is connected to the community in many ways, its face has most often been that of Williams.
Born in 1955, Williams grew up in Watkinsville, graduated from Oconee County High School and the University of Georgia, and began his career in south Georgia as an agricultural management and loan specialist.
Williams worked in Atlanta and Greensboro in banking before returning to Oconee County in 1999 to launch North Georgia Bank, which opened its doors on April 17, 2000.
In March of 2010, then Gov. Sonny Purdue appointed Williams to the Georgia Forestry Commission board.
In June, he took over as chairman of the Georgia Bankers Association.
Locally, Williams has been active in the Chamber of Commerce and in local politics, particularly when development has been at issue.
In 2007, when BOC Chairman Melvin Davis needed support with the Board of Commissioners for the Hard Labor Creek Reservoir project in Walton County, Williams joined Oconee State Bank President Amry Harden in urging the BOC to join Walton County.
It did, with Davis breaking the 2-2 tie vote among the other commissioners.
Davis is Williams’ vice-chairman on the Industrial Development Authority.
At a Town Hall Meeting the BOC held on development in June, Williams spoke several times, once raising a question about the equity of the county’s Future Development Map, which makes it less likely land in the south of the county will be opened up for development.
Williams lives at 2410 Old Watson Springs Road in the southern part of the county, though he said he, personally, was not unhappy with the development map.
In late 2009, Williams and his brother, a former member of the Board of Education, sold to the school board land in Watkinsville for a future school system headquarter in a transaction that subsequently became controversial in the community.
And Williams stepped forward in the Spring of 2010 as an advocate for the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences when the university was facing budget cuts and had targeted the agriculture college.
Oconee State Bank, founded in the 1960s, is the only Oconee County bank standing now that the state Department of Banking and Finance stepped in at 6 p.m. on Friday and closed North Georgia Bank.
North Georgia Bank’s main office was at 7911 Macon Highway, just west of Hog Mountain Road. The bank opened a second office several years ago on Epps Bridge Parkway at Timothy Road.
At the closing on Friday, the state turned North Georgia Bank over to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as receiver.
Banking is a regulated business in Georgia and other states, and the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance has as its mission the promotion of “safe, sound, competitive financial services in Georgia through innovative, responsive regulation and supervision.”
The failure of North Georgia Bank probably was not much of a surprise to those in the know.
On July 14, 2009, the bank had entered into an agreement with the FDIC and the Banking Commissioner of Georgia not to grant dividends, take on increased debt or purchase shares of its stock without prior approval.
And The Oconee Enterprise had a front-page story last week indicating that North Georgia Bank had returned funds to potential new investors after its effort to raise additional capital last year failed to produce a sufficient response.
But only insiders knew of the timing.
The Georgia Department of and Finance does not give any public notice before a financial institution is closed.
State and federal agents came to the bank’s two offices at 6 p.m. closing time on Friday. According to David Barr, press agent for the FDIC, a press release about the action was put out 15 minutes later.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Oconee Enterprise and the Athens Banner-Herald had the stories on their web sites about 15 minutes after the release went out.
BankSouth will purchase all of the deposits, except those from some deposit brokers and those placed over the Internet.
BankSouth also agreed to purchase $123.9 million of the assets, including all of the loans.
The FDIC and BankSouth entered in a “loss-share transaction” in which BankSouth will assume some, but not all, of the loss if the loans are not repaid.
The FDIC estimates that the cost to the FDIC of the closure of North Georgia Bank will be $35.2 million.
According to the FDIC, all shares of North Georgia Bank were owned by its holding company, North Georgia Bancorp, Inc. The holding company was not part of the transfer to BankSouth.
Zoom Bait on Jennings Mill Road does not have a sewer hookup and relies on its septic system to treat its waste water.
When it asked the county for a rezone in 2004 so it could expand its warehouse space, Zoom Bait didn’t ask the county for any sewer services, saying they were unnecessary for the expansion.
St. Mary’s Highland Hills, Inc., Zoom’s neighbor on Jennings Mill Road, asked for a change in zoning in 2005 so it could expand its retirement community by adding a hospice and an Alzheimer’s and dementia center.
The county approved the zoning change, and in 2008 the county granted St. Mary’s 5,100 gallons per day in additional sewage treatment capacity for the two new units.
After the design was finished, the county reduced that amount to 1,700 gallons per day to reflect projected needs from the actual facility to be built.
That 1,700 was in addition to the 7,500 already assigned to St. Mary’s for the retirement community.
Both the new capacity allocation and the original 7,500 capacity allocation came from the 25,000 gallons per day in sewage treatment capacity that Oconee County obtained from Clarke County by contract back in 1994.
That contract continues in perpetuity.
Of the 25,000 in capacity Oconee County bought from Clarke County back in 1994, the county currently is using about 15,000 gallons on an average day, Utility Department Director Chris Thomas told me.
That usage peaks at about 19,000 gallons per day, leaving 6,000 in excess capacity.
According to Thomas, Zoom Bait needs 4,580 in sewage treatment capacity to replace its septic system, or 1,420 less than the excess capacity.
And Zoom Bait’s need is only 1,180 more gallons per day than the 3,400 allocated to St. Mary’s on Dec. 22, 2008, and subsequently reduced to 1,700.
The problem, according to Thomas, is that at least some of that excess capacity already has been allocated to other potential future users.
And Clarke County has said it cannot handle addition effluent.
On Tuesday, the Board of Commissioners is scheduled to decide whether to go forward with construction of a new $773,000 sewer line that would provide sewage services to Zoom Bait for the first time and duplicate the sewage services currently provided to St. Mary’s.
BOC Chairman Melvin Davis is a big proponent of the project, but the other four commissioners have expressed reservations, saying it is not clear if the project is designed for Zoom Bait and St. Mary’s or for the owner and future developer of an 114-acre tract that the line will cross after it leaves Zoom Bait and St. Mary’s.
The 114-acre property already has access to a sewer line, but the new line would not require the developer to pay for expensive pump stations to get the sewage from future businesses on the site to the existing line.
The county’s experience with these pumps has been negative. They are costly to maintain and often stink.
Chairman Davis, in his weekly column in the Jan. 27 edition of The Oconee Enterprise, focused on the value of the new sewer line for future commercial development, including of the 114-acre tract owned by the Gordy Family and, according to the county, under option to Atlanta developer Frank Bishop.
The Georgia Department of Community Affairs has given the county a grant of $186,711 to cover part of the proposed costs for the sewer line.
The county told the state it needed the grant and sewer line to keep Zoom Bait, which manufactures artificial fishing lures, from leaving the county and to help St. Mary’s operate within its “financial means.”
The county said Zoom and St. Mary’s provide jobs for low or moderate income employees and will hire additional low-to-moderate income employees once the sewer service is in place.
The focus on low and moderate income jobs made it more likely the county would obtain funds from the state, which administers monies from the federal Economic Development and Employment Incentive Program.
In the proposal, the county did not hide the fact that the proposed sewer line would cross the 114-acre undeveloped tract. It only said it was proposing the project to help Zoom Bait and St. Mary’s and that no development plans for the 114-acre parcel were before the county.
I called the Department of Community Affairs office on Jan. 28 to ask if the state cared about the county’s current focus on the benefit of the sewer line to the developer of the 114-acre tract.
Brock Smith, who is handling the Oconee County grant, told me that the state does not care.
“If the funds were awarded to the local government, they are local government funds,” he said. The county does have to meet the program criteria spelled out in the grant, he said.
Smith cautioned that he was new to the job, had not read the application and knew nothing about the controversy over it.
I reviewed the 2004 rezone application of Zoom Bait and the 2005 rezone application of St. Mary’s on file in the Planning Department of the county to learn about sewer capacity requests and allocations.
The BOC has the Zoom Bait/St. Mary’s project on the agenda for the Feb. 8 meeting because the Board would not approve at the Jan. 4 meeting a request by Oconee County Economic Development Director Rusty Haygood and Thomas that the county put the sewer line out to bid.
At that meeting, Haygood and Thomas reported on their efforts to get the owners of the property the proposed line will cross to donate easements for the line.
The value of the easements was put at $600 in the case of Zoom Bait, $19,640 from St. Mary’s, and $84,910 for the Gordy Property. The county would have to pay the Gordy representatives $1,000 in legal fees.
Nothing was said at that meeting about the easement for a fourth property owned by the city of Athens.
When I met with Thomas in his office on Jan. 28, he told me that Oconee County will have to pay Athens between $500 and $600 for that easement.
Thomas told me that when he and Haygood estimated the total cost of the project at $773,000 in July of last year, they were including rough estimates of the amount that the county would have to pay for easements.
The $773,000 projection was based on a bid for the construction work of $642,767 that has expired, making it impossible to know the current best estimate of project costs.
The county proposes to pay for the costs of the sewer line not covered by the state grant from sales tax revenues previously unallocated.
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In an earlier version of this story, I reported that the rezone for the expansion of Zoom Bait was in 2005. The Board of Commissioners approved the rezone on Nov. 2, 2004. I apologize for the error, which is corrected in the text above.
The Citizen Advisory Committee on the Oconee County Web site decided at its meeting tonight to push ahead with efforts to document investments by county government entities in web operations.
County Commissioner Margaret Hale, a member of the Committee, agreed to ask County Administrative Officer Alan Theriault to help her catalogue the amount of time spent by staff in the county’s various departments with the existing county web operation.
She also said she would ask County Finance Director Jeff Benko to identify any information technology expenditures in departmental budgets.
And Hale said she would ask Sheriff Scott Berry to talk with her about the web activities of his office.
Committee member Kate McDaniel agreed to talk with representatives of the county school system to get an understanding of how the schools are using the web to communicate to school constituencies.
Tony Glenn will examine how Watkinsville manages its web site, and Dan McDaniel will investigate how other cities and counties in the state are using the web.
Dan Matthews will talk with representatives of the County Parks and Recreation Department to better understand their decision to create a stand-alone web site linked to the county’s main page.
Sarah Bell and I will try to learn how the offices of the probate judge, tax commissioner and clerk of courts manage their web operations.
This was the second meeting of the self-appointed citizen advisory committee, and all seven members attended the hour-long session at the county library in Watkinsville.
Since the gathering of the group in October, subcommittees have had several meetings to gain an understanding of how the county web site operates.
The county currently leases space for the web site at a cost of $240 per year and has one person devoting about a third of her time to its maintenance, according to Theriault, who met with Bell and me on Nov. 5.
Theriault estimated that the county is spending between $10,000 and $12,000 at present on this visible part of its web operation.
Departments contribute to the web site, however, and he said no one had ever documented how much staff time is being committed to web activities.
The county is restricted in what it can do with the site at present because of the tight budget, Theriault said.
Bell and I summarized our meeting with Theriault at the start of the meeting tonight.
We were followed by committee member Dan Matthews, who reported on information he gained on the Parks and Recreation Department and on the Planning Department. Matthews said both departments reported investing considerable staff time in the web.
Dan McDaniel and Kate McDaniel said they were told by the county’s Information Technology Director Paula Nedza that the county would need between $20,000 and $45,000 for a more robust web site.
Glenn reported that Bogart and Bishop do not have a presence on the web, and that North High Shoals has a small site. Watkinsville, the largest city in the county, has a more sophisticated operation, he said.
I assembled the Committee last summer after discovering that the county had no policy for deciding what goes on to the web site. The other six members of the Committee responded to my call for others in the county interested in the web and its potential for the government in the county.
The Committee tonight decided to meet again next month to continue its discussion. The date set for that meeting is March 22.
The Board of Directors of Oconee County’s Farmers Market, ready to launch the 2011 season, chose a new president tonight, decided to meet with vendors next month, and agreed to move forward with an application for grant money to hire a full-time manager.
Last year’s market launched on May 8, and the Board is considering an even earlier start date for this year, if vendors indicate at the meeting in February that they will have things to sell in late April or early May.
Last year (below) the market, held on Saturdays, remained open until the end of October.
Russ Page, one of the original organizers of the Farmers Market, told the Board that Watkinsville has agreed to close First Street behind Eagle Tavern to allow new vendors to join the market.
The Board had discussed moving out of Watkinsville because the market has expanded and the space available behind the Tavern no longer is adequate.
The market launched in 2004 in the front yard of Eagle Tavern but moved to the rear of the Tavern in 2009 to allow for more vendors and because the county sodded the grass in front of the historic tavern.
Page was selected as president of the Board of Directors at the meeting tonight, replacing Karl Berg, who has decided to step away from his work on the Market. Cindy Norris was selected to be vice president, and Debbie Beese and Jamie Swedberg were selected again as treasurer and secretary, respectively.
Other members of the Board are Amy Shane, Tim Walker and I. The Board did not have an official vice president before the meeting tonight.
Beese told the Board , meeting at her house outside Watkinsville, that the organization has grown enough that “we need a full-time market manager.”
The group agreed to make an application to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for grant funds for that purpose. If successful, Oconee Farmers Market would hire someone for six or seven months to take on that task.
In the meantime, the Board members agreed to spread responsibilities of a manager among themselves.
The Board also agreed to move forward with new signage for the market and to explore various promotional and marketing strategies.
Included is the possibility of T-shirts and tote bags that would carry a marketing message for the market.
The Farmers Market is a nonprofit organization, and vendors pay 5 percent of their sales to support its work.
The candidates seeking in 2010 to represent Oconee County in the Georgia House of Representatives spent a total of $93,244, according to campaign finance statements filed with the state Ethics Commission late last year and earlier this month.
That is $26,476 less than Bob Smith and Becky Vaughn spent in the 2006 campaign, the last time the 113th House District race was contested.
The vast majority of the money spent by the candidates was for advertising of one form or another.
The second largest expense was for campaign consultants.
The records provide only a broad overview of campaign spending in the 2010 campaign. They indicate that money went to a particular consultant or marketing firm, but they usually do not indicate what the consultant or marketing firm actually did for the candidate.
One thing they do not show is who was responsible for the most negative element of the 2010 campaign: the automated telephone calls and web site launched at the end of the July Republican primary attacking successful candidate Hank Huckaby.
The telephone calls and the web site contained grossly misleading information about a statement Huckaby had made in the June 3 candidate forum sponsored by the Oconee County Chamber of Commerce.
Neither the telephone message nor the web site indicated who was responsible, and state law does not require such disclosure.
Among the three Republicans, Huckaby, Kirk Shook and Tommy Malcom, Huckaby spent the most in his campaign. The total figure, according to his Dec. 31, 2010, Campaign Contributions Disclosure Report, was $71,594. Huckaby filed that report on Jan. 7, 2011.
Shook spent $13,099, according to his final report, filed on Dec. 31, while and Malcom spent $8,551. Malcom filed his December report on Jan. 1, 2011.
Huckaby and Malcom are from Oconee County, while Shook is from Crawford in Oglethorpe County.
Democratic candidate Suzy Compere, from Bostwick in Morgan County, did not file the required campaign financial statements for September, October and December.
In June, when Compere filed her sole statement, she indicated she had neither raised nor spent any money. She was required by law to include the $400 filing fee in her June campaign report but did not.
She also is required by law to file a statement for the three campaign periods she missed and can be fined for not doing so.
I removed from the total of $93,244 in spending in 2010 a $50,000 loan that Huckaby made to his campaign and repaid, as well as a $2,500 loan that Shook made to his campaign and then repaid and $500 that Malcolm made to his campaign and repaid.
If those figure are left in, the spending for the campaign was $146,244.
Malcom actually lent his campaign $6,819 and raised $1,732 in outside money. At the end of his campaign, he showed a balance of zero.
Shook lent his campaign $5,000 and raised $13,099. His final report shows no reserves.
Huckaby raised $81,745 independent of his loan to his campaign of $50,000. He ended the campaign with $10,151 in reserves.
The comparison of the $93,244 in spending in 2010 with the $119,720 spent by Smith and Vaughn in 2006 is not affected by the removal of the loans from the calculations. Neither Smith nor Vaughn lent money to their campaigns in 2006.
Smith, first elected to the House in 1998, retired after the 2010 session, resulting in the three-way primary contest in 2010.
Malcom spent $6,569 in various forms of advertising, including for yard signs, newspaper advertisements and direct mailing costs. These calculations come from the classification by Malcom himself of expenses of more than $100 per item.
State law requires candidates to list each expense of more than $100.
The advertising expenses made up 90 percent of the itemized expenses Malcom reported.
Malcom did not use a consultant.
Shook spent $8,628 on various forms of advertising, or 68 percent of his itemized expenses.
Shook spent $3,000 on consulting from Landmark Communications, a Duluth political consulting firm. In fact, Shook paid Landmark for much of his advertising, so the actual amount of money that Shook lists as spending with Landmark was $9,659, or 77 percent of his total itemized campaign spending.
Smith used Landmark as consultant in 2006 and 2008, according to his campaign finance reports for those years.
According to Huckaby’s campaign reports, he spent $49,438 on advertising, which amounted to 83 percent of his itemized spending.
Huckaby indicates he spent $10,600 on his consultant, The Brand, of Grayson, or 15 percent of his total itemized spending.
Huckaby also lists other campaign services companies, including The Stoneridge Group of Buford and Brasstown Strategies of Young Harris, on his itemized expenditure sheet.
Huckaby chose to respond to the attack telephone campaign, Hank Likes Taxes, with his own rebuttal, though the itemized expenses do not provide enough detail to indicate who provided the service or how much it cost.
The attack campaign used both a computerized autodialer and a computer-delivered pre-recorded message to accuse Huckaby of “liking taxes.” Such a call is referred to as a "robo call" on the grounds it resembles a telephone call by a robot.
The telephone call directed voters to a web site, hanklikestaxes.com, and that site mentioned Shook favorably by name. It said that Shook had challenged Huckaby on his record on abortion.
Shook and his campaign consultant, Gabriel Sterling, told me they did not have any responsibility for or advance knowledge of the robo calls or the creation of the web site.
Nothing in Shook’s campaign finance report gives any indication that he was connected to the call or the web site.
I was among those who received the automated telephone call. I was not at home, but my answering maching recorded the message at 4:59 p.m. on July 15, the last Thursday before the July 20 primary election.
The message said that Huckaby was not a conservative and played an audio clip of Huckaby saying “I won’t say that I will never raise taxes.”
I called Shook on his mobile phone while he was vacationing in Florida on July 28, and he said the first he knew of the robo call was on July 15, when the campaign was launched.
“I didn’t buy any robo calls,” he said. “I don’t like them anyway. I was as shocked as anybody else.”
He said he has no connection to the web site or the robo calls and did not have any idea who was responsible for them.
I talked by telephone in early August with Sterling, Shook’s campaign consultant, who is vice president of Landmark Communications.
Sterling said Landmark was not in any way connected with the robo call and he did not have any idea it was in the works until after it had been done.
“If we want to attack somebody, we just attack,” he said.
Stacey Kalberman, executive secretary of the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission, told me that there is nothing in Georgia law that requires identification of the source of advertisements, which would include the robo call and the web site.
The robo call used an audio clip from the June 3 Oconee County Chamber of Commerce campaign forum, and the web site used a video image from that same meeting.
Zoe Gattie, manager of the Oconee County Chamber of Commerce, told me that only two people were video recording the meeting.
One of them was Sarah Bell, an Oconee County citizen, who was using my video camera.
I compared the image on the web site with the image recorded by Bell with my camera. I had uploaded that image to my Vimeo site, so it could have been used by the creator of the robo call and the web site.
Examination of the two images shows that the web image from hanklikestaxes.com was shot from a slightly different angle than the image on the video recorded with my camera by Bell.
Gattie told me that she thought Oconee County Republican Party Chairman Jay Hanley would know who the other videographer was.
Hanley told me that Shook had arranged for someone to video record the Chamber forum.
I contacted Shook on Aug. 13, and he told me that Justin Melick of Kennesaw shot the video for him.
“Ours wasn’t very good,” Shook said. Shook said he wanted to use video from the Chamber forum on his own web site, kirkshook.com.
Shook said a third person also was video recording but that he never was able to find the third videographer.
Bell told me she also thought a third person was taking pictures, probably video, during at least some parts of the meeting.
Bell, who is active in the Oconee County Republican Party and knows Shook, said Shook never contacted her and asked to use her video.
Shook gave me a telephone number for Melick, and I spoke with him on Aug. 13.
Melick said he had the video. “I did it as a favor for Kirk,” he said.
He said the video was recorded in high definition and that it was long and in a format that made it difficult to share. He said he would convert it for me and let me know when it was available.
He also gave me an email address.
I tried to reach him repeatedly by phone and by email for the next several weeks. He never took the calls or answered the email.
On Aug. 30 I used my wife’s cell phone to call, and Melick answered. He said he was still working on the video.
“I had to try to figure out a way to get the format where we can somehow get the size that we can work with,” he said. “I’m not having any luck. It is so huge. It might be another few days before I can come up with something.”
Melick confirmed that the email address he gave me was correct and that he had been receiving my voice and email messages.
I sent him another email message the following day and he confirmed receipt by email.
I sent Melick another email message on Sept. 19. I have never heard any more from him.
I searched for Melick on the web using the email address he gave me and found a Facebook page on which a Justin Melick lists his “affiliation” as with Justin Melick Film Productions.
The Melick Facebook page links to two YouTube videos, one listed as being shot on Dec. 22 of 2010 and the other with a date of Feb. 3, 2010. The second is called a Justin Melick film.
An analysis of the video of the June 3 candidate forum shows the gross simplification and distortion that the robo call and web site presented.
WGAU newsman Tim Bryant moderated the Chamber Forum on June 3 and asked the question that became the springboard for the Hank Likes Taxes attack.
At the session, Bryant said he was having trouble reading the question, which he said was written by someone with handwriting worse than his own.
The question was presented as from the audience, which contained supporters of the candidates as well as their staffs.
Bryant asked: “Have you signed a pledge not to raise taxes?”
Shook got the question first, and he said he had signed the no tax pledge.
Democrat Compere was second, and she said she had not signed the pledge.
Malcom, next up, also said he had not signed the pledge but he was opposed to tax increases.
Huckaby was next, and he said that in a recession “We’re not going to raise taxes. That would be counterproductive.”
But Huckaby added:
“I won’t say that I would never raise taxes because there might be a situation in which, to make the system fairer, more equitable for every people, for all our people, you might raise one tax but lower other taxes.”
Incumbent Sen. Bill Cowsert, running unopposed but also on the platform at the Chamber forum, followed Huckaby and said he would not sign the pledge. He agreed with Huckaby that it might be necessary to make tax adjustments that some would characterize as a tax increase.
The hanklikestaxes web site was even harder hitting.
It began with the headline “Hank Likes Taxes” and followed with two subheads: “Democrat Insider/Bureaucrat, Running as a Republican to Win Office” and “In the House District 113 Republican Primary there is a big difference between the candidates.”
Beneath these was this short video clip:
The web site contained an image of Rich Whitt’s book, “Behind the Hedges,” which is critical of University of Georgia President Michael Adams. The web site said Huckaby was a “key player” in “corruption at the University of Georgia.”
The site claimed that Huckaby had supported Democratic candidates financially through his career, citing www.opensecrets.org and www.ethics.ga.gov as sources.
Those sources show that Huckaby did support Democrats, but he also has made contributions to Republican Congressman Paul Broun’s campaign since 2008, and the Hank Likes Taxes web site did not mention that.
The site also had links to four stories from onlineathens.com, the web site of the Athens Banner-Herald. The tease to the stories asserted that Huckaby favored raising property taxes, favored a stormwater fee for Clarke County, and was “under an ethical cloud” because of a bonus paid to University of Georgia President Adams.
The web site was active as late as Aug. 11, and I was able to download the video clip on that date. I had talked with Melick about the video on Aug. 13.
I checked the site again on Aug. 21, and it was no longer active.
I have tried to find the web site in various web archives since without success.
I also have tried to determine who bought and registered the handlikestaxes.com web site.
The site hanklikestaxes.com was registered through LuckyRegister on July 7, 2010, with an expiration date July 7, 2011.
The registration was last updated on July 15, 2010. It was registered at Domains By Proxy, Inc., a company at 15111 N. Hayden Road, Suite 160, Scottsdale, Ariz.
It is not possible to learn who purchased or owns the domain name.
Shook’s campaign web site, kirkshook.com, was registered by a company in Toronto.
Whoever built the web site had to invest quite a bit of time to find the information on Huckaby, create the links, edit and upload the video and build the remainder of the copy.
Purchasing the domain name and hosting a web site, however, would not be expensive.
Rates for the purchase of domain names vary, but the GoDaddy.com web site this weekend offered to sell me hanklikestaxes.net for $12.99 per year. GoDaddy informed me that hanklikestaxes.com is not available.
GoDaddy offered unlimited bandwidth and storage for the web site at $14.99 per month.
Anyone with political contacts could find someone to create and launch a robo call.
Jeremy Brand, who served as a campaign consultant to Huckaby and worked with him on the response to the robo call attack, told me that the rate for robo calls of about 30 seconds in length is usually about 5 cents per completed call.
Huckaby said in his rebuttal robo call that an automated call had been made to voters “lying about me and my record.” Huckaby said the call came “from one of my opponents who didn’t have the courage to put their name on it.”
In the message Huckaby asked voters to call him if they had any questions and gave his number. He told me he got only one or two calls as a result.
Huckaby got 50.9 percent of the vote in the Republican primary, or just enough to avoid a run-off. Malcom got 30.2 percent and Shook got 18.9 percent.
The race was tightest in Oconee, which falls entirely in the 113th, and where Huckaby got 46.8 percent to 34.3 percent for Malcom and 18.8 percent for Shook. Huckaby and Malcom live in Oconee County, while Shook is from Oglethorpe County.
Huckaby got 58.8 percent of the vote in Oglethorpe County, 58.1 percent in Morgan County and 66.8 percent in Clarke County.
The fall campaign was uneventful. Compere never mounted a visible campaign.
Huckaby got 72.5 percent of the vote overall, carrying Oconee with 80.0 percent, Morgan with 76.2 percent, Oglethorpe with 72.3 percent, and Clarke with 52.1 percent.
Smith defeated Vaughn, who did mount a campaign, back in 2006 with 61.1 percent of the vote.
Candidates are required to list campaign contributions of more than $100 on the finance reports.
Huckaby, a former administrator at the University of Georgia, received contributions from many at the university, including from President Adams, Provost Jere Morehead and former Provost Arnett Mace.
Most of the money Huckaby raised came in early, giving him the resources he needed to launch his advertising campaigns.
Shook’s largest contribution of $2,000 was from American Federation for Children, Georgia Division. According to the organization’s web site, it is an advocacy group for school choice.
Malcom’s campaign was largely self-financed.
Both Shook and Malcom are teachers.
The Hank Likes Taxes robo call and web site stood out in the 2010 campaigns, but there were other oddities.
Superior Court Judge David Sweat, running for re-election in a nonpartisan campaign, sent out an endorsement by Oconee County Sheriff Scott Berry. Sweat used the post office box of the county jail for the return address of the endorsement letter.
Sherilyn Streicker, the deputy executive secretary of what was then the State Ethics Committee, told me in October that, in her view, the use of the return address alone did not constitute a contribution to a campaign.
Pamela Hendrix who was challenging Sweat, also took the unusual tactic of focusing on Sweat’s religion.
She did this first in a story by Mike Sprayberry, a reporter for The Oconee Leader. Sprayberry quoted her in an article on Oct. 14 as saying “people need to be aware of their judge’s backgrounds. I’m a member of Ashford Memorial Methodist and my opponent attends Universal Unitarian Fellowship and there’s a difference.”
She repeated that line in response to a question from me about what differentiates her from Sweat. She said “I attend Ashford Memorial Methodist Church; he attends the Universal Unitarian Fellowship.”
Neither of them accused the other of liking taxes.
And there was no mystery of the third videographer.
The Oconee County Citizen Advisory Committee on Recreational Affairs spent an hour tonight without heat, electricity, and, of course, plumbing at the Central Schoolhouse in Heritage Park discussing what to do with the building.
“You all brought this up as a potential agenda item at our October meeting,” County Parks and Recreation Director John Gentry told the Committee. “I suggested no better place to start our discussions than actually at the facility.”
Members of the committee used flashlights to look around before considering the building’s future.
The Oconee County Board of Commissioners approved a concept plan for the Heritage Park History Village at its Dec. 7 meeting, with the schoolhouse as the centerpiece. But it did not address questions about the uses to be made of the buildings.
The two-story schoolhouse contains a stage and theater seats on the second floor as well as one large classroom with smaller rooms on the first.
The Committee meeting was held in the larger classroom, illuminated by gas lanterns.
Gentry said the major issue the Committee needs to resolve is the uses to be made of the schoolhouse once the historical village is built out around it.
“Is it more museum oriented, where it is more static display?” Gentry asked. “Come to visit, walk through and leave. Or is it an active facility?”
The Committee didn’t resolve that question, preferring instead to come back to it at a future meeting. What it did do was review a list of renovation requirements for the building.
These include a structural review, a review of the electrical, plumbing, heating and air conditioning requirements, painting and repair of the inside, and exterior renovation, including provisions for handicap access.
Even before the Committee turned its attention to the schoolhouse, it confronted another major issue before it.
The county is being offered a mule barn. As Gentry said, that is not part of the concept plan for the History Village.
Committee Chairman Mike Streetman said such barns were common in the county and could be considered an appropriate part of the village.
The issue is how to finance movement of the building and others to Heritage Park and then how to finance their upkeep.
Central Schoolhouse was moved to Heritage Park in the very southern part of the county from Colham Ferry Road in 2004, Gentry said. Much of the next year was spent building a foundation, putting on a new roof, replacing the windows, and doing minimal preservation to the exterior.
Gentry said that work was completed in 2005, and the building has sat largely untouched from then until now. It is open to the public only sporadically, making tonight’s meeting a rare opportunity to see the insides of the nearly 100-year-old structure.
The question is how to find funds to move forward with the renovation and with the further development of the village itself, he said.
