The Oconee County Board of Commissioners is set on Tuesday night to change how members of the Hard Labor Creek Regional Reservoir Management Board are appointed, allowing for more flexibility in appointment of citizens.
The Board also is scheduled to discuss and consider advertisements for citizens who wish to be considered for Management Board membership.
Motorists approaching Epps Bridge Parkway on the Oconee Connector Extension soon will see a new, illuminated billboard as a result of a settlement with Fairway Outdoor Advertising that also calls for the elimination of three, much older signs on U.S. 78 at Ruth Jackson Road.
When the Oconee County Board of Commissioners on Feb. 12 followed Chairman Melvin Davis' lead and made appointments to four regional boards, it both replaced people and reappointed people whose terms had not yet expired.
And while Davis said the appointments were required based on intergovernmental and related agreements, he and the commissioners actually went counter to those agreements in making some of the appointments, an examination of those agreements and other documents shows.
More than four years after the Oconee County Board of Commissioners voted to move forward on a Transfer of Development Rights program, the county has finally advertized for and received applications from consultants who have said they would like to work with the county on the project.
Wayne Provost, director of Strategic and Long-Range Planning for the county, told the Citizens Advisory Committee on Land Use and Transportation Planning last night that the county had received responses from Rick Pruetz of Hermosa Beach, Calif., and Ross and Associates of Atlanta.
The Hard Labor Creek Regional Reservoir Management Board today turned aside an attempt by Oconee County Board of Commissioners Chairman Melvin Davis to gain control of one of the three Oconee County slots on the Management Board.
Oconee County Commissioner Jim Luke, who chairs the Management Board, said he did not think his fellow commissioners would support Davis' proposed change in the language of the intergovernmental agreement creating the Management Board.
Neither Oconee County nor the Sheriff’s Office has made any purchases in the last five years from Dana Safety Supply, with which Sheriff Scott Berry disagreed publicly earlier this year because of the company’s decision not to sell some of its products to the general public.
The Sheriff said during that disagreement that he had made recent purchases from Dana Safety Supply, and he told me on Monday that those purchases had all been with personal, not county, funds.
Rose Creek Mitigation Bank, one of two such banks operating in the county, is awaiting a state permit to be able to violate the 25-foot stream buffer so it can modify restoration work done in initially setting up the bank.
James Parker, manager of Falling Springs, an environmental resource company in Richmond, Va., told me in a telephone conversation on Feb. 5 that his company is being “proactive” in asking the Georgia Environmental Protection Division for permission to modify the existing restoration structures.
