Near the end of a very busy agenda tomorrow night, the Oconee County Board of Commissioners is set to take up an application for a beer and wine license at University 16 Cinemas now under construction inside of Epps Bridge Centre off Epps Bridge Parkway.
The application is to allow the sale and consumption of beer and wine in what is labeled on the application as the food service area, a banquet room and one of the theater’s 16 auditoriums.
One of the votes cast on the controversial request to put a materials recovery facility on Dials Mill Road on Tuesday night likely will come from Commissioner Jim Luke, whose wife's family has property about a mile from the site.
The family connection is not enough to require Luke to recuse himself, according to County Attorney Daniel Haygood.
If the Bernard Garrett family gets a favorable vote from the Board of Commissioners after Tuesday night’s public hearing on its request for a permit for a materials recovery facility on Dials Mill Road, it will have passed a first hurdle in getting a state of Georgia permit for the facility.
Before the state would issue its permit, it would hold another hearing where the public could once again state its support or voice its opposition to the proposed plan.
The Oconee County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday is scheduled to approve a change in sewer policy requested by Chairman Melvin Davis to facilitate construction of an assisted living facility at the corner of SR 316 and the Oconee Connector Extension.
The new policy repeats the existing requirement that no more than 50 percent of the capacity of either of the county’s two sewage treatment facilities can be allocated to residential use, and it excludes from the calculation of residential use facilities operated as an “assisted living community.”
While residents in subdivisions near the proposed materials recovery facility on Dials Mill Road have been most outspoken about the project, the decision the Board of Commissioners makes about the facility has the potential to impact indirectly residents of two other areas of the county.
One of the areas is south of Watkinsville, where the Board of Commissioners in 2005 turned down a request for a waste transfer station. That request is likely to come back if the BOC approves the Dials Mill Road project.
Two officials from the north Fulton County city of Milton last night told 30 Oconee County citizens, including four commissioners, why Milton adopted just last June a Transfer of Development Rights program.
The reason, Mayor Pro Tem Bill Lusk told the group, was simple.
The residents wanted to maintain the rural character, the “green space, the open space, your farms,” he said, and the TDR program was a mechanism for doing just that.
Oconee Farmers Market will begin operating 4 to 7 p.m. Tuesdays on the grounds of Watkinsville First Christian Church in downtown Watkinsville starting on May 14.
Market Manager Cindy Pritchard said the expanded market is in response to customer requests and to help vendors during the peak part of the growing season.
