Adam Hammond and Sheri Ward Long, candidates for Post 4 on the Oconee County Board of Education, agreed on many issues in separate, 45-minute long interviews.
Hammond, the Republican Party nominee, and Long, running as a Democrat, said there is a need for more transparency in the way the Board interacts with the public.
Oconee County Superior Court Judge Lisa Lott on Monday dismissed a lawsuit seeking to force the Oconee County Board of Elections and Registration to stop registering voters and seeking to force the Board to hold a hearing on a challenge to the registration of 228 persons on the voting rolls.
Lott issued her ruling dismissing the lawsuit filed by Suzannah Heimel after a 50-minute hearing that focused on requests for dismissal by Oconee County resident Susan Noakes and Common Cause Georgia and by Oconee County itself.
Oconee County Commissioners on Tuesday night, in a short agenda-setting meeting, tentatively agreed to spend an additional $116,311 to cover increased design service costs for the Bear Creek Water Treatment Plant expansion.
The initial estimated cost for the design services, approved by the Board in November of last year, had been $2,298,279, but in May the contract cost increased to $2,786,779, and Oconee County’s portion of the cost increase is 23.8 percent, bringing the total cost to the county to $663,532.
Oconee County Superior Court Judge H. Patrick Haggard has rejected the request by Townley Family Partnership LLLP for a review of the decision by North High Shoals Council to deny the Townley petition to deannex 175.8 acres from the city.
Haggard ordered that the Council’s ordinance passed on April 15, 2024, prohibiting the deannexation of any parcel of land in the Town exceeding 15 acres “should be affirmed.”
Data analyst and blogger Charles Hayslett divides the state of Georgia into two parts that he calls Atlanna and Notlanna, and he says the two parts differ in terms of population, population health, economics, educational attainment, and politics.
The gap between the two parts of the state is large, Hayslett said, with Atlanna generally doing well and Notlanna not.
Oconee County Schools and the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office have been talking about installing school resource officers in the system’s schools for 10 years and intensely for the last five years, Sheriff James Hall said at the meeting of the Oconee County Republican Party on Monday night.
As a result, he said, now that the Board of Education has voted to develop an agreement with the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office to install deputies in the schools, it should be possible to move forward with those plans quickly.
Officially, the four-minute confrontation between the Oconee County Board of Education and the co-publishers of The Oconee Enterprise at the Board meeting on Aug. 12 didn’t happen.
At its meeting on last Monday, the Board approved minutes of that meeting that made no mention of the conflict, which resulted in Amanda and Michael Prochaska being escorted out of the room by school administrators and sheriff deputies.
