Oconee BOC To Hash Out Budget and Power Relationships

And Power For Prince Avenue Too

The Oconee County Board of Commissioners meet on Tuesday night to hash out two seemingly unrelated issues, the 2009-2010 fiscal year budget and rules of governance for the Board itself.

In fact, the two issues are tightly linked.

The four commissioners, starting back in February made it clear they wanted to have a strong hand in fashioning next year’s budget.

In the end, BOC Chairman Melvin Davis submitted a budget he and Finance Director Jeff Benko agreed on, leaving the four commissioners either to accept it or try to reshape it in public.

The four commissioners have taken the bait, but so far they have been unable to agree on exactly what changes need to be made in the budget that Davis said in his letter to citizens is conservative yet provides "for the continuation of our basic governmental needs."

These budget issues will dominate the first part of the meeting, which starts at 7 p.m. in the regular commission meeting room at the courthouse in Watkinsville.

In the second part of the meeting–officially labeled a work session--commissioners are to examine as yet undisclosed proposals from County Attorney Daniel Haygood to clarify the powers of the commission chairman and of the other four commissioners.

This is an issue the chairman and four commissioners have been struggling with for years, mostly behind the scenes. It broke into the open on Sept. 25 when the board held a working session at the courthouse on the topic.

The Board has held two subsequent meetings at the Community Center in the new Veterans Park on Hog Mountain road, on May 6 and 19. These are now available for viewing at my Vimeo site.

An editorial in the June 11 issue of The Oconee Enterprise, which generally shows great fondness for Davis, accused the commissioners of "jealousy" of Davis and new Commissioner John Daniell of "idealism warring with his adding machine." (Yes, that really is what it said.)

The editorial concluded with the admonition to "Leave the budget and Melvin Davis alone."

Not to be out done, the Athens Banner-Herald gave Johnathan McGinty, a former reporter and editor at the paper and current blogger, space in the paper on June 16 to attack the four commissioners for the "absurdity of trying to pinch pennies" by making more cuts in the budget Davis put forward.

McGinty also talks about a DeLorean "minus Michael J. Fox" in a kind of one-upmanship with the Enterprise’s "adding machine."

McGinty wants the Board to go along with Davis’ proposal to use part of its $11 million Fund Balance to make the budget work. Davis originally proposed that the county draw $921,734 from that fund, but Benko, in response to the four commissioners, has cut the amount of the draw to $613,234.

McGinty uses the figure of $10 million for the surplus, but Benko assured me in a conversation on May 29 that the figure is $11 million. The problem, according to Benko, is that not all of that is unencumbered.

The county used $6 million of that to front the right of way purchase for the Oconee Connector Extension that will open up land for commercial development on Epps Bridge Parkway. The state reimbursed the county, but it has set the money aside for a similar purchase arrangement of right of way for widening of Mars Hill road in the future.

To keep even more money in the Fund Balance, Daniell has proposed that the county stop paying $35,000 to John McNally, who has a contract with the county to serve as executive director of the Keep Oconee County Beautiful Commission.

Mary Mellein, chairperson of the Commission, sent an e-mail message round the county today saying the action essentially would eliminate the Commission. According to Mellein, the Oconee County body must be affiliated with the National Keep American Beautiful Inc, and to be such an affiliate, it must have a full-time executive director.

At the June 2 meeting, when the cut in McNally’s position was last discussed, the Board voted to refund $26,000 to Prince Avenue Baptist Church in code enforcement fees, retroactive to last year. So the Board spent nearly McNally’s salary doing a favor to the church and its advocate, businessman, developer and landowner Mike Power.

That’s not the only irony of this budget discussion. The Oconee County Board of Education, with hardly any public attention, passed its budget on June 8. That budget is for $75 million and also is balanced by drawing on reserves.

The budget being considered by the BOC is only for $34.5 million, yet it has generated, in relative terms, a lot of attention.

And while both the BOE and the BOC have held the tax rate steady, homeowners can expect to pay about $200 more next year in property taxes because the state almost certainly will not be providing funds to the county for Homestead Tax Relief.

So despite all the talk about holding the line on tax rates and moderate or non-existent property value growth, taxes are going to go up for most people.

That’s the reality of the front part of the BOC meeting on Tuesday. The reality for the back part is that BOC Chairman Melvin Davis has a lot of power regardless of what rules the others members put in place.

But those other four members have the ability to check that power, as they also have demonstrated with the budget.

Voters Not Well Informed About Oconee SPLOST

So Who Really Voted?

Only about one in five of the registered voters in Oconee County closely followed the discussions about the Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax before it was approved by voters on March 17, and only half even knew that the vote was for renewal of a tax already in place.

Only 6.6 percent of all registered voters cast a ballot on March 17, so these findings–from a survey of registered voters conducted by two graduate students and me just after the election–are hardly surprising.

Rather they confirm the success of the county officials in running a low-key campaign for the tax initiative and holding the election at a time when relatively few voters were likely to show up at the polls. Research around the state has shown–and the experience of the county with tax votes has confirmed–that approval is likely if turnout is low.

Of the 1,457 voters who cast their ballots at the March 17 special election, 71.2 percent approved the tax. The county had 22,113 registered voters at the time of the election.

In our survey of 128 registered voters whose names we drew from the registration list at the beginning of February, 16.9 percent said they did not even know about the SPLOST tax until they received the survey sent them in the mail the day after the election.

Another 63.7 percent said they paid some attention to discussions about the SPLOST tax before the elections, "but I did not follow the discussions closely."

Only 10.5 percent told us they "paid quite a bit of attention to the discussions" about SPLOST and 8.9 percent said they "followed the discussions very closely."

Only 53.6 percent of those who returned the survey answered affirmatively (correctly) this question: "As far as you know, did Oconee County collect a SPLOST tax of 1 cent on the dollar even before the March 17 vote?" A few (4.0 percent) said the county did not have such a tax, and 42.4 percent said they did not know the answer.

The sample is relatively small, but the odds are good (19 out of 20) that had we interviewed all registered voters rather than the sample our answers would have been within plus or minus 8.8 percent of those we received.

In fact, we conducted the study as a methodological exercise to determine our success in completing interviews–in this case through the mail–with the sample of voters we selected. The two students were Nicoleta Corbu, a visiting Fulbright Scholar from Romania, and Qingmei Qing, a doctoral students from China.

Both worked with me in the Cox International Center in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.

We sent the survey to 500 voters selected from the full list of voters by chance, and the post office returned 39 questionnaires because the voter no longer lived at the address given. This means that 27.8 percent of those who received the survey returned it. This is comparable to return rates in many national telephone surveys.

Among our 128 returned surveys were 32 from voters who said they actually went to the polls on March 17, or, at 25.0 percent, a considerably higher ratio than for voters overall.

Among those 32 who said they voted, 30 answered the next question as to how they voted, and 21–or 70.0 percent–said they voted for SPLOST. That is very close to the 71.2 percent for the actual election.

That is the good news. But there is bad news as well.

The voter lists themselves are public records, since only if these kinds of records are open for examination is there any way to counter voter fraud. We have to know the list contains the names of real people.

Also public are records of whether an individual actually did vote, though, of course, how one voted is secret. Again, we have to be able to determine if those recorded as voting are real people.

Four of the 128 persons who returned our survey removed their names from the returns, making it impossible for us to match their names with voter files for the March 17 election, but 124 did not.

The 32 person who indicated they had voted were among these 124, and 29 of the 30 who indicated how they voted were among the 124.

The actual vote records, however, show that only 16 of the 32 who claimed they voted actually did vote. Of the 16 who actually did vote, 14 had told us how they voted. Nine said they voted for the SPLOST, or the equivalent of 64.3 percent.

In other words, if we simply wanted to match our results with vote outcome, we would be slightly better off including those who told they voted but actually did not.

It seems that at least some of our respondents felt they should have voted but didn’t, and they corrected for that by giving us the wrong answer to our question on whether they voted.

But it seems they would have voted pretty much the same as those who did go to the polls had they actually participated in the election.

My two students and I completed these analyses just last week. We hope to discuss the results of our study and one we did for the November 2008 election in Oconee County at a scientific conference this fall.

Voters were much more honest in reporting on their voting behavior in the November election. And the sample again matched pretty closely the actual election outcome.

The survey is just one more piece of evidence that the SPLOST election may have been a success from the point of view of county officials who wanted the tax to be approved, but it has to be considered a failure if the goal was to get an informed electorate to the polls to make a considered judgment about whether the sales tax was good or bad for the county.

The county was not allowed by law to advocate for or against the tax, but it was allowed to promote participation and to run an information campaign to help people know about the election and about the details of the tax.

The county held the required public hearings and posted some basic information on the county web site. In other words, it did the minimum.

Media Struggle with Story on Oconee Meetings Violations

Thanks for the email

When I posted my blog late on the night of May 23 revealing that Oconee County Board of Commissioners Chairman Melvin had called not two but three meetings without proper public notice in a 13-month period ending on January 1 of this year, I sent email messages to reporter Adam Thompson of the Athens Banner-Herald and Editor Blake Giles of The Oconee Enterprise.

Thompson sent me an email message the next day and posted a brief item on his blog shortly after I responded. He followed with a lengthier story in the paper on Monday in which he obtained comments from the three commissioners at the meeting, Davis, Margaret Hale and Chuck Horton.

The paper also ran an editorial criticizing the county for its violations of the state’s open records laws on Tuesday.

So far, the Enterprise has not written anything about the Dec. 1 meeting.

The Enterprise first reported the story of the second meeting back in February. The meeting itself had been on Dec. 17. (The Enterprise does not have a fully accessible electronic archive to which I can link.)

The way the two papers have responded is illustrative of two related problems facing the established media. First, journalists historically have had trouble dealing with citizen activists. Second, they have trouble dealing with the competition they now receive from citizen journalists.

The basics of the three meetings are pretty simple. On Dec. 7, 2007, the Oconee County Board of Commissioners held a meeting in Madison for which it had not given proper public notice. I posted a story on my blog on Jan. 6, 2008, about the meeting.

The Banner-Herald followed my story with several of its own and criticized Davis editorially. The Enterprise never reported on the meeting.

When the Enterprise broke the story about the second meeting of county officials to discuss the future of the courthouse, the Banner-Herald followed with its own story. The paper also ran a critical editorial. No public notice had been given of that meeting.

The third meeting was a prelegislative meeting with Rep. Bob Smith and Sen. Bill Cowsert. No public notice was given of that meeting.

Reporter Thompson, in his blog on May 24, praised me for revealing the Dec. 1 meeting, but he also personalized the issue, by writing that "Both Becker and Davis have been here before."

He did create a link in the blog to my postings, and he attributed to me the basic information about the meeting. At that point, the story, according to Thompson’s account, was that a citizen had found documents that the citizen felt illustrated that the county had held yet another illegal meeting.

The scientific literature on journalism is replete with references to this type of treatment of citizens. Citizens who challenge governmental leaders are treated with caution. The general assumption is that the governmental leaders know more.

This is contrary to the popular view expressed by journalists that they represent the citizens and are the watchdogs of journalism. The evidence is that the media sometimes play that role, but it is more common in movies than in real life.

Thompson, who will be leaving the paper on June 12 to go to law school, generally has been quite good at treating citizens as important news sources for news stories about the county. This was not true of his immediate predecessors.

I learned about the Dec. 1 meeting as a result of open records requests I did of the county and of the Board of Education. I put some of the key documents on my web site, and these were available to Thompson.

Of course, they could have been fakes, and he certainly should have authenticated them via his own request for documents before he wrote his story.

Instead, he advanced the story–journalistic language for additiong something to the story beyond what was initially reported–by revealing that the Dec. 1 meeting between state Rep. Smith and Sen. Cowsert and local government officials was an annual event, according to local officials, and usually was hosted by the Chamber of Commerce.

He also got quotes about the meeting from Davis, Hale and Horton, who attended the meeting.

What Thompson did not do was indicate in the printed story–or in the online version–that the Jan. 1meeting had been reported on initially by me and that the documents illustrating exactly what had been done were available on my web site. He also never created any links in the online story to those documents.

The established media–called main stream media or legacy media by many–are having difficulty acknowledging that they are now sharing their occupation with a group of others often referred to as citizen journalists.

In Oconee County, citizens can supplement the information available from the daily Banner-Herald and the weekly Enterprise by feeds from blogs by former BOC Chairman Wendell Dawson, Watkinsville Councilman Brian Brodrick, North High Shoals Councilman Steve Holzman, Democratic Party activist Dan Matthews, Republican Party activist Kate McDaniel, and me.

Citizen journalism has received a lot of attention nationally as the traditional media have cut staff and struggled with declining circulation, decreased advertising revenue and increased competition. Some of this attention is reflected in the Knight Citizen News Network, which now lists this blog among the citizen journalism sites in Georgia.

The Enterprise has been particularly blind to most of these alternative information sources, as its behavior on this story illustrates.

I didn’t bother to send an email message to the other weekly newspaper in the county, The Oconee Leader, since it rarely covers government news. But it should know how to monitor my blog. It can be done by signing up as a follower on the site, by using an RSS reader or by asking me to be put on my listserv, which contains 115 email addresses. These options are listed on the site itself.

The Leader also hasn’t written about the Dec. 1 meeting as of yet.

In the five days that followed my May 23 posting, 295 unique visitors went to my blog to read the story. I posted a new story on the sixth day.

That 295 is a far cry from the potential readers of a story in the Banner-Herald, which has an audited weekday circulation of 3,800, or of the Enterprise, which has an unaudited circulation of 4,000.

That was the reason I sent the tip to the Banner-Herald and the Enterprise. I wanted to give the Thompson and Giles time to get the story into their papers.

Thompson really did advance the story, not only through revealing that the meetings were routinely held without public notice, but also through the quotes. One from Chairman Davis was particularly informative.

Thompson wrote:

"Last week, Davis defended his actions and denied holding secret meetings. But he acknowledged that if he'd asked, the county attorney probably would have advised him to advertise the session with local legislators."

The state open meetings law is very clear that this was suposed to be a public meeting. As I pointed out in my blog, it does not matter if the Chamber of Commerce called the meeting or if Davis called it.

In this case, the evidence is clear that Davis alone called the meeting. The documents I put on my web site and to which I linked in my blog are unambiguous. They came from Davis.

Violating the law, however, has few consequences. It states:

"Any person knowingly and willfully conducting or participating in a meeting in violation of this chapter shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction shall be punished by a fine not to exceed $500."

Citizens can bring charges against the officials, but that puts a pretty heavy burden on citizens.

As I told Thompson when he asked, I did send a note on May 24 to Stefan Ritter, Georgia deputy attorney general, asking him to read my blog. Given his unresponsiveness to my previous formal complaints about what I feel were other open meetings violations in the county, I chose not to file a formal complaint this time.

Ritter wrote me back two days latter. The letter simply said: "Thank you."

GDOT Lets Bids for Entrance to Oconee Shopping Center

More Magic Still Needed?

Atlanta developer Frank Bishop cleared the last legal hurdle for development of his $76 million Epps Bridge Parkway shopping center last week when the Georgia Department of Transportation awarded a bid for construction of the Oconee Connector Extension.

The Oconee County Board of Commissioners last October set as a condition of its rezone of the 63-acre Epps Bridge Centre site that construction could not begin until the state had awarded a bid for the roadway.

Bishop plans to build a major shopping center with a 16-screen movie theater, several restaurants and major retail anchors on the site, which, without the Oconee Connector Extension, has only a single right turn in and right turn out access point on Epps Bridge Parkway, opposite the Waffle House near Kroger.

The roadway, delayed several times as the state has struggled to find funds and as it worked its way through the process of obtaining permits from the United States Army Corps of Engineers for stream and wetland damage, is designed to open up land for Bishop and other developers.

In addition to the property owned by Bishop, four other large tracks are available for development behind Lowe’s, Wal-Mart and Kohl’s.

Oconee County has strongly promoted the development, lending the state $6 million for right of way purchase for the Connector Extension, which will make a loop from SR 316 at the current intersection of the Connector north and then back to Epps Bridge Parkway between the Verizon store and Lowe’s.

The state did reimburse Oconee County for the $6 million, but county Finance Director Jeff Benko cited the loss of interest from the $6 million used for the right of way purchase as part of the explanation for the county’s revenue shortfall this fiscal year.

On May 28 GDOT awarded a bid of $13,465,759 to G.P.S Enterprises Inc. of Auburn for the 1.488 mile project, that includes a widening and reconstruction on Jennings Mill Parkway and construction of a bridge and approaches over Sr 10 Loop. The project has a December 31, 2011, completion date.

G.P.S. was one of six bidders for the project when bids were opened in April, but a decision on awarding of bids was delayed at least in part because GDOT had not yet purchased mitigation credits for the work.

The Corps of Engineers requires anyone destroying streams and wetlands to mitigate that damage by stream and wetland restoration elsewhere–or the purchase of mitigation credits from someone else doing the restoration.

GDOT purchased 3.2 wetland credits from Jeffco Boys LLC of Atlanta, which operates a mitigation bank on the Middle Oconee River in Jackson County, and 3,268 stream credits from Environmental Services Inc. of Stone Mountain, which operates a mitigation bank on a tributary to the Middle Oconee River in Hall County.

Bishop plans to clear all but one of his 63 acres and pipe and fill streams and wetlands on the site. He has purchased a site in Greene County and developed a commercial mitigation bank there to sell himself mitigation credits.

Katie Sheehan, a staff attorney at the River Basin Center in the Eugene P. Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia, has prepared a resolution for the Oconee County Board of Commissioners that would urge the Corps of Engineers in the future to mitigate damage to Oconee streams and wetlands with mitigation in the county, or at least upstream from the county so the county would gain some benefit in cleaner water.

The BOC on May 5 referred the resolution to its Land Use and Transportation Committee, which has taken no action on it so far.

Sheehan drafted the resolution after talking to me about the development in Oconee County and reading my blog about it. The streams and wetlands are on tributaries to McNutt Creek, which forms a border between Oconee and Clarke counties.

G.P.S. also was the low bidder in December when the state first sought bids for the Oconee Connector Extension project and eight companies submitted bids. At that time, G.P.S. bid $13,969,803. The state rejected those bids for unspecified reasons.

Oconee County has promoted the roadway as a way of increasing commercial development in the county. Commercial development produces both higher property taxes than undeveloped land and more sales tax revenue.

At least some of that development has been and is likely in the future to be at the expense of Clarke County. The move of Wal-Mart from the Atlanta Highway in Clarke to the Oconee site has been the biggest example so far, but the recent opening of the AT&T store near the Kroger and the closing of the Atlanta Highway store shows a continuation of that trend.

Shoppers coming from the Atlanta Highway to the Epps Bridge Centre and other future development will access the Oconee Connector Extension via an exit from the Loop or an access road that will take traffic from and funnel traffic to Jennings Mill Road. That road intersects Atlanta Highway opposite Logan’s Roadhouse.

That already is a very congested part of Clarke County.

The question now is whether Epps Bridge Centre developer Bishop can work the same magic in the financial and retail market in these difficult times as he has in getting the roadway built.

The state purchased the land needed for much of the right of way for the Oconee Connector Extension from Bishop, who purchased exactly the land needed for the roadway when he purchased the site for his shopping center.

QuikTrip Wants Variance for Oconee Connector-Daniells Bridge Road

Fewer Trees, Less Buffer, More Parking

QuikTrip Corporation is asking the Oconee County Board of Commissioners to allow it to reduce the number of shade trees, eliminate the minimum screening buffer and allow parking inside setbacks so it can build a gas station and convenience market at the busy Oconee Connector-Daniells Bridge road intersection.

The county’s planning staff has found that the request does not meet the conditions to grant two of the variances and has recommended that the third be denied in part. The county’s Public Works Department did not comment on the first two variances and supported the planning staff recommendation on the third.

The 1.3 acre lot already is zoned for highway business development, so QuikTrip does not need a rezone. What it does want is permission to develop the site at odds with the county’s Uniform Development Code, or the coding regulations of the county.

The Board of Commissioners already has granted QuikTrip a temporary construction and grading easement on the adjacent Fire Station 8.

On June 2, the Board will hold a public hearing before deciding whether to grant the variances.

The proposed gas station would have 16 fueling positions and a 4,555 square foot building for the convenience market and would have entrances from both the Oconee Connector and Daniells Bridge road. The Connector is three lanes wide at that point, while Daniells Bridge road is two lanes wide.

The property is bordered on the north and east by the fire station. Just further east on Daniells Bridge road is a hotel currently under construction. The property for the gas station is owned by A. Paul Keller, Jr., and JJMB, LLC. According to the tax records, the mailing address for Keller and JJMB is 1010 Prince Ave., Athens.

The UDC requires that 14 shade trees with a minimum height of 10 feet be planted in the landscape strip between the gas station and the roadway. QuikTrip only wants to plant seven.

The planning staff said this requested change would result in "reductions to the quality and consistency of the landscaping on the site along one the most traveled corridors of the county."

QuikTrip wants to eliminate the evergreen screening buffer required between the gas station and the fire station.

The planning staff concluded that "If this request were approved to reduce the opaque buffer requirements, substantial detriment to the public good would occur in the forms of a reduction in the rural character of the area and lack of buffering between incompatible land uses."

QuikTrip also wants to be allowed to build two parking spaces inside the 30-foot setback from the right of way for the Oconee Connector and four parking spaces inside the 30-foot setback from the right of way for Daniells Bridge road.

The planning staff–and the Public Works Department–recommended acceptance of the violation of zoning requirements on Daniells Bridge road but not the Connector.

"If this request is approved to allow parking spaces in the required parking space setback along Daniells Bridge road," the staff concluded, "there should not be a substantial detriment to the public good. However, parking spaces inside the setback adjacent to the Oconee Connector should not be allowed."

The report does not explain the difference between an adverse effect for the two roads.

The Oconee County BOC decided on Dec. 4 to spend $400,000 in improvements for Daniells Bridge road to justify its decision to rezone property just east of the blind curve on the road for development of an office park.

Those improvements, which would include an upgrade to the intersection of Daniells Bridge road and the Oconee Connector, has not begun.

Oconee Officials Met Secretly to Discuss Assembly Session

Davis Set Two December Meetings Without Public Notice

Oconee County Board of Commissioners Chairman Melvin Davis sent out an email message on November 14 of last year to 18 local governmental officials, including the four other members of the board, inviting them to a special meeting on Dec. 1 with Sen. Bill Cowsert and Rep. Bob Smith.

The secret meeting, held at the Civic Center on Hog Mountain road, is a previously undocumented part of the complex story about the unsuccessful efforts by the Board of Education to increase its salary during the most recent legislative session.

Two members of the Board of Commissioners told me that Rep. Smith used the meeting to sharply criticize the Board of Education for always wanting more state money, though he made no specific reference to Board of Education salaries.

The critical comments, on the surface at least, makes it particularly odd that the BOE and Smith subsequently discussed legislation that would have increased the salaries of the board members.

The two commissioners who told me of that discussion, Margaret Hale and Chuck Horton, confirmed they attended what was billed as a "Pre-Legislative Session" and that Davis was there, meaning that a quorum of the board was in attendance.

The Nov. 14 email message from Davis also went to members of the Board of Education, making it possible a quorum of that body was present as well.

The county has not released any agenda for the meeting, any minutes or any record of who was in attendance, though I filed an open records request asking for precisely that information.

The county also has not provided any documentation that the legally required advance notice of the meeting was given to the public and the media, though I asked for that as well in my open records request.

County Strategic and Long-Range Planning Director Wayne Provost, saying he was acting at Davis’ suggestion, called another meeting of 16 elected and appointed governmental officials for Dec. 17. That meeting, held at the courthouse, was to discuss future plans for the courthouse building.

That Dec. 17 meeting also was not properly announced, so the county had two meetings at odds with the state’s open meetings laws in a little more than two weeks. The Dec. 17 meeting did not become publicly known until The Oconee Enterprise wrote about it on Feb. 5 of this year.

Davis left the Dec. 17 meeting after greeting the other guests because two other commissioners, Don Norris and Horton, were in attendance. The three would have made a quorum, as Hale, Horton and Davis did at the Dec. 1 meeting, which Davis did not leave, according to Hale and Horton.

I filed my open records request regarding the Dec. 1 meeting with the county on May 10, and County Clerk Gina Lindsey sent me an email message on May 14 indicating that she had 10 pages of email regarding "the Pre-Legislative Session sponsored by the Oconee County Chamber of Commerce."

Lindsey asked me to let her know when I wanted to come by the courthouse to review and copy the pages. Lindsey is responsible for handling open records request for the county.

When I dropped by late in the afternoon of May 15 and read the email messages, I noted to Lindsey that there was no reference in any of them to the Chamber of Commerce. She said Chairman Davis had told her that the session was sponsored by the Chamber. She said she had not even known of the meeting until I filed my open records request.

On May 20 I called Howard J. Whitfield, the new president of the Chamber of Commerce, to ask if the Chamber had any records of the Dec. 1 meeting that were available to the public. He said he had been asked by someone else about the meeting and, being new to the job, had asked Zoe Gattie in his office for details.

According to Whitfield, Gattie checked with former President Charles Grimes and was told the Chamber had not been a sponsor of the Dec. 1 meeting.

The state’s Open and Public Meetings Law excepts from the definition of a public meeting one called by another "agency" provided the meeting is "at places outside the geographical jurisdiction" of the governing body and "no final official action is to be taken" at the meeting. The Civic Center is both in Oconee County and under the control of the Board of Commissioners.

In the email message Davis sent to county officials on Nov. 14, he said that "Arrangements have been made for the Pre-Legislative Session" with Cowsert and Smith. The session, according to the email, was scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. and conclude by 5 p.m.

"Please come prepared to discuss subjects you desire to be addressed during the ‘09 legislative session," Davis said.

The message was sent to Hale and Horton as well as Commissioners Jim Luke and Don Norris. It also went to Christine Franklin, then head of the school board, and board members David Weeks, Mack Guest, Tommy Malcom and David Williams. Superintendent John Jackson also was on the list.

Others on the invite list were North High Shoals Mayor Jeff Thomas, Bishop Mayor Johnny Pritchett, Bogart Mayor Terri Glenn, Watkinsville Mayor Jim Luken, and Chuck Williams, chairman of the Oconee County Development Authority and president of North Georgia Bank.

Copied on the email were Alan Theriault, county administrative officer, Jane Greathouse, executive assistant and deputy clerk, and John Daniell, elected to Board of Commissioners in November.

Hale and Horton could not remember which of those invited actually attended but said members of the Board of Education definitely were present, that Smith directed the discussion at the school board and that discussion of education was a key part of the meeting.

Davis sent an email message to Smith and Cowsert on Nov. 8–four days after all three of them we re-elected–saying that "We have discussed the Oconee County/Legislators pre-session discussion earlier" and asking which dates "suite you for this session." He suggested a breakfast meeting on Nov. 19, Nov. 21, Dec. 1 or Dec. 8.

On Nov. 14 Davis wrote back by email to the two of them saying that "As per my conversation with you personally and your office, it appears the time of December 1, 2008 from 3:00PM to 5:00PM works best for the two of you." He sent out the message to the invitees later that day.

Despite the negative feedback from Smith at the Dec. 1 meeting, the Board of Education and Smith went forward with discussions about salary increases for board members.

Smith sent me an email message on April 13 indicating that "sometime in late February, 2009, I instructed my legislative aide to have the Oconee County School Board attorney communicate directly with my legislative counsel regarding the legislation being proposed."

The Legislative Counsel Office drafts laws for legislators and, according to Smith the office drafted two bills, one on March 2 and the other on March 10. Smith said "My first preview of the original draft (LC 5574) was on a Thursday following the March 2, 2009 draft."

That would have been March 5.

Smith sent me copies of the two pieces of legislation. Both set the salary for the chairperson of the Board of Education at $10,000, the salary for the vice-chairperson at $7,000, and the salaries for the other three members at $6,000. All five board members currently receive $1,800 per year.

The first of the two bills made the effective day of the legislation July 1, 2009. The second made the effective date July 1, 2010. Otherwise the bills are identical.

The Enterprise edition of Feb. 5–the same one that revealed the secret Dec. 17 meeting called by Provost for Davis–contained a required legal advertisement announcing the intent of the Board of Education to introduce local legislation to change school board member salaries.

The Georgia constitution requires that this type of advertisement be placed in the local newspaper before the legislature takes action on it. The Enterprise, however, didn’t write a story about the increase until more than a month later.

On March 9, the Board of Education voted in its regular public meeting to approve the request for the pay increase. Then Chairman David Weeks, Vice-Chairman Mack Guest, and members Tom Breedlove and Mike Hunter all voted yes. Board member Kim Argo voted no.

The March 9 motion included the effective date of July 1, 2010. That was the date included in the second piece of legislation drafted by legislative counsel for Smith on March 10. The first piece of legislation, with the earlier effective date, had been drafted seven days earlier.

According to the story in the March 12 edition of the Enterprise, Smith told the paper on March 11 he was not going to introduce the legislation.

Weeks didn’t send the copy of the minutes of the March 9 meeting to Rep. Smith and Sen. Cowsert until March 11.

I learned that as a result of an open records request I filed with with the Weeks on April 7.

I asked for "Any and all written correspondence or electronic correspondence between you, other members of the Board of Education, or representatives of the Board of Education, including but not limited to the Board’s attorney, and Representative Bob Smith of the Georgia General Assembly written or sent between Nov. 1, 2008, and this date related in any fashion to the salary of members of the Board of Education."

I received a package of materials from the BOE postmarked on April 20.

Included was the March 11 email from Weeks to Smith and Cowsert as well as an email from Superintendent John Jackson on that same date.

In that email, Jackson told Weeks "If Bob doesn’t agree to the January 2011 start, let’s take our lumps and move on. I know you like to win, but this isn’t just about us. It can be a huge distraction for the School District and give the press lots of fodder. We’ve learned a very valuable lesson; now let’s move on–raise or no raise."

The documents I received from the Board of Education in response to my open records request show that new board member Breedlove was particularly aggressive in responding to criticism about the proposed salary increase.

He also was most direct in criticizing Smith.

"Prior to our meeting we were told by Representative Smith that he was supporting us, that he would carry the legislation forward," Breedlove wrote in an email to James M. Allison on March 13.

"Only when we had the public meeting this Monday and successfully voted to move it to the House did Mr. Smith do an about face and break his commitment to follow through with the support he had given us," Breedlove continued.

"You may commend him for that," Breedlove wrote. "Or you might read into this that perhaps there were already other motives he had in mind for steering in an alternative direction to that which he had personally committed."

Breedlove copied this and his other similarly worded messages to Smith.

The list of recipients and persons copied on the email messages I received were sometimes incomplete, with printing stopping in the middle of an address.

On a March 13 message that Breedlove sent to "Ms. Goodroe," however, it is clear he copied BOC Chairman Melvin Davis. The original message from Liz and Mike Goodroe to which Breedlove was responding also included Davis’ name.

The connection, at least in one sense, was appropriate. The Dec. 1 secret meeting that Davis called was the early stage of the behind-the-scenes negotiations of elected officials that flared up in public three months later with the Board of Education salary fiasco.

Oconee Public Hearing on Budget Set for Tuesday

Not a Routine Year

The public will be given a chance to comment on the proposed 2010 Fiscal Year Budget during a scheduled half-hour hearing Tuesday night at the courthouse in Watkinsville.

Almost no details of the budget have been released to the public or discussed in the media, so it is unlikely the few citizens who show up at the 6:30 p.m. hearing will have much to say.

That’s not because the budget is likely to be a routine one.

Commissioner Chuck Horton said to me in response to questions I asked him on Thursday that the commissioners are being told the projected revenue from all sources for the budget starting July 1 will be about $21 million.

That is $2 million less than the county expected to collect this year and $4 million less than the county had budgeted to spend this year. The budget approved for fiscal year 2008-2009 drew $2 million from county reserves to cover the $25.2 million in projected general fund expenditures.

According to a report county Finance Director Jeff Benko gave to the BOC on April 21, the county had collected $17.3 million as of the end of the first three-quarters of the year, or 75 percent of the expected revenue.

Benko told the board, however, that he was projecting a $1.2 million shortfall in general fund revenue by the fiscal year’s end on June 30.

Collections from the penny-per-dollar Local Option Sales Tax--one important source of county General Fund revenue--have been running behind most of this year and were down $127,580 in April compared with a year earlier.

The county has frozen spending in many categories to bring expenses in line with revenue.

The Utility Department, which operates with its own budget, had collected only $3.7 million during the first nine months of last year, Benko reported. That represented 57 percent of income, versus the expected 75 percent.

Utility Department Director Chris Thomas told the BOC at a budget meeting on April 15 that he needs a 32 percent increase in base water rates and a 24 percent increase in base sewer rates as part of his budget for 2009-2010.

Commissioners in short order will have to approve that budget and the rate increases as well as figure out how to deal with the $4 million General Fund shortfall. They can cut back on expenses, dip again into the reserves, increase property taxes or do some combination of these.

The budget is supposed to be in place by July 1, and the first item on the BOC agenda at the regular meeting on Tuesday night is the 2010 Fiscal Year Budget.

That meeting starts immediately behind the official public hearing, meaning the public will be commenting without the information given to the commissioners only a few minutes later.

Among the missing pieces of information is the Tax Digest, or the estimated worth of property in the county. The value of property in the county determines the amount of money a set property tax will produce.

The Athens paper has written extensively about budget problems in Athens-Clarke County but largely ignored the problems in Oconee. The local weeklies have been even worse.

Without more information, the public isn’t in a very good position to ask tough questions about the budget at the required legal public hearing Tuesday. Only a half hour has been set aside at any rate.