Watkinsville alone among Oconee County’s four cities will hold an election this fall, with two candidates competing for the mayor of the city and two more competing for Post 2 on the City Council.
Incumbent Watkinsville Mayor Dave Shearon and Bob Smith, a real estate agent, filed paperwork last week qualifying for the mayoral contest.
The Oconee County Board of Commissioners has not yet gotten around to appointing its new advisory committee on transportation.
Commission Chair John Daniell, has said, however, that its first order of business will be to review the 282-page report presented to the county by the Georgia Department of Transportation earlier this year.
MACORTS, the metropolitan planning authority for Oconee County and its neighbors, is asking the public to comment on the 2045 draft of its Metropolitan Transportation Plan that includes 13 road projects in Oconee County on the prioritized project list.
Included is a last-minute update to the plan for widening Hog Mountain Road from Butler’s Crossing to U.S. 441. The update calls for a two-lane rather than four-lane road that also will include turn lanes, sidewalks and bike lanes.
Every Oconee County School System employee–from the first-in-the-morning bus driver to the school superintendent–is now wearing an electronic alert system badge that can signal a school safety threat with three small taps of a button.
With the taps, the employee sends a signal to the school office and to the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office telling exactly who pushed the button and where that person is located.
Former Columbus Mayor Teresa Tomlinson told Oconee County Democrats on Thursday night that they didn’t have to flip Oconee County for the party to be able to beat incumbent Republican David Perdue in the U.S. Senate race in November.
All they need to do is shave three or four percent off the county margin from Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams in 2018, Tomlinson said.
The Oconee County Board of Education at its meeting on Monday officially adopted a millage rate of 16.5, down from the 17.0 from last year, and the lowest property tax rate collected for the county’s schools since 2003.
The millage rate vote was unanimous and expected, as the Board of Education had adopted a budget for the 2019-2020 Fiscal Year that began on July 1 based on the lowered rate.
Oconee County School System Chief Operating Officer Claire Buck on Monday returned to the performance of Oconee County Schools in the Spring 2019 state Milestones assessments in her report to the Board of Education.
Anisa Sullivan Jimenez, director of Communications for the school system, had told the Board at its July 29 meeting that Oconee County Schools had performed well in the results of the state testing, released on July 26.
