Candidates in Oconee County’s Georgia House District 113th Race Differ on Issues and in Style

And in Likely Longevity

It seems almost certain that only a small percentage of the 35,750 eligible voters will cast ballots in the July 19 runoff election for the open seat in Georgia House District 113.

Of those who do vote, most are likely to use party to help them pick between the two candidates.

That suggests that Republican Chuck Williams will be representing Oconee County and parts of Clarke, Morgan and Oglethorpe counties in Atlanta at the special session next month.

No doubt at least some, perhaps small, number of voters will not use party labels to decide between Williams and Democrat Dan Matthews and will rely instead on what the candidates have said and done during the campaign.

These voters will have much to ponder.

In the three campaign forums and in interviews the two candidates have given during the campaign, neither has followed traditional ideological lines.

The two have agreed on many issues and differed on others.

And the two candidates have shown they are different in style and background.

Williams has said in an interview he did with 1340 WGAU radio newsman Tim Bryant on May 4, when he was the only declared candidate, that he would not pledge not to raise taxes if elected. Bryant had not even asked him about such a pledge.

“I am intending to avoid during this campaign and after I take office falling into that trap of making unequivocal statements, signing pledges or what not, for no new taxes, because I do subscribe to the Republican theory of minimal government, minimal taxes, but the fact is this state and any governmental entity has got to have adequate revenue to function,” Williams said.

Matthews did take such a pledge on taxes, saying in his closing comments at the candidate forum on June 30 that he “will say no” to raising taxes and fees.

On the social issue of abortion, the two candidates have taken very similar stands.

Both said they are pro-life, but both also said they would not restrict a woman’s choice.

“I don’t think abortion should be used as birth control,” Matthews said at the June 30 forum. But he said he would not tell women what to do on the issue.

“I also have a problem with telling women what to do,” Williams said. “At the end of the day, I’m pro-life. I believe that abortion is something that is not good, is not proper.”

Matthews says he would have voted against House Bill 87, which critics and supporters alike say takes a strong stand against illegal immigration. He said it is hurting businesses in Georgia, particularly agriculture.

Williams said he would have supported it “reluctantly.” At the June 30 forum, however, he gave a nuanced answer about his support.

“We all want fruits and vegetables on the store shelves when we go. When we stay at a hotel, we want our rooms cleaned, but yet we bemoan the fact that illegal immigrants are putting a big burden on our health care system, on our criminal justice system, and on our schools.”

Both said they are supportive of Hard Labor Creek Reservoir, which Oconee County wants to build with Walton County and for which the two counties are seeking state support.

Matthews said finding funding to finance the Georgia Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission was not a priority.

“I am not going to commit to do that because I don’t think we have the money to do that,” he said at the June 30 forum.

Williams said he would support finding funding for the Commission.

“We’ve just got to find a way to do it,” Williams said.

Williams also wants stronger, not less, government involvement in banking regulation, and said as a legislator he would work to strengthen the State Department of Banking and Finance.

“In times of adversity, banks need a strong regulator,” he said in his May 4 interview with Bryant.

In the June 8 candidate forum, Matthews said “I wouldn’t want the government in the state of Georgia telling people and telling banks how to do their business.”

Williams reminded Matthews and the audience that the state of Georgia already does regulate banks.

Williams has described himself, at least by inference, as a “social moderate and fiscal conservative.”

Matthews has described himself as a “libertarian Democrat.”

Matthews and Williams have had to deal with their histories during the campaign.

Williams has spent much time explaining his role as founder and president of North Georgia Bank, which failed in February.

He was asked about the issue at all three candidate forums.

Williams presided over the failure of a bank he started and helped in the transition to a new bank owner. He walked away with, by his own admission to Tim Bryant in an interview on July 6, at least a million dollars in loss.

Despite these setbacks, Williams had enough confidence in himself to come out of retirement as a tree farmer and say that his experiences with the bank qualified him to represent the county and rest of the district in Atlanta and help the state of Georgia manage its financial crisis.

“I learned lessons that I will take to Atlanta and I will use as we try to help Georgia work through similar problems,” Williams said at the June 30 candidate forum at the Civic Center.

Banks that fail usually make bad loans, that is, loans to people who cannot repay them. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation sold most of the North Georgia loans to BankSouth, but the FDIC expects to share in losses from them.

Williams said at that forum that North Georgia’s loan portfolio was “weighted toward residential and development construction money.” When the local residential market collapsed, so did his bank.

Williams reminded the audience his bank was making loans in a period in which lenders were promoting “innovative mortgage products.”

Williams said as the CEO of North Georgia bank “I obviously accept responsibility for everything that occurred at our bank.” But he said he wanted that to include ”not only the problems but the good things we did,” such as supporting local charities.

Matthews has had to distance himself from his history as a partisan, liberal blogger

At the June 30 candidate forum, Bryant, who served as moderator, asked Matthews if he had any second thoughts about a blog he had written at the time former Congressman Charles Norwood was dying of cancer.

Matthews said he could not remember the blog.

The message in the blog isn’t very clear, but it certainly is possible to read it as insensitive to Norwood, as the questioner in the audience at the forum did.

Bryant returned to the blog when he interviewed Matthews on July 5, and at this time Matthews was more contrite.

He said he had gone back and reread the blog.

“In five years, I’ve changed. In five years, my father passed away and died,” Matthews said.

“Yes, what I said in 2005 and wrote in my blog was inartful,” he added.”It was probably poorly written, and I’m sorry if I scorched the ears of anyone.”

Williams is the ultimate insider, and he has emphasized that in the forums.

He has served on local and state governmental boards and has ties to former Gov. Sonny Perdue and current Gov. Nathan Deal. He is the darling of the Oconee County Chamber of Commerce, in which he has been active.

Ed Perkins, active in the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce, is his campaign chairman, according to records he filed with the Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Committee.

Larry Benson, president of Benson Bakery of Bogart and local hotel owner, is his campaign treasurer.

Dan Matthews’ most prominent role has been as chairman of the Oconee County Democratic Party, a decidedly low-key activity in the strongly Republican county.

His filing papers list only himself.

In an amended campaign finance statement filed on Wednesday, Matthews reporting raising only $4,411, including a loan of $100 he made to his campaign. He had $1,605 on hand to spend.

Williams reported in an amended statement he filed this morning that he had raised $20,228, including a loan of $5,908 he made to himself. He had $12,885 on hand to spend.

Matthews is an office manager working with two attorneys in Athens.

During the campaign, Matthews has discussed his personal life openly. He has said repeatedly he is a single father, and he brings his son with him to political events.

Williams has been reserved, saying little about his personal life.

Matthews wore a suit to all three candidate forums, but he didn’t look very comfortable in the suit. He never has had the tie pulled tight.

Williams dressed for each in banker dark blue suits and jackets.

Williams speaks slowly in a clear, southern drawn. He weighs his words, showing little sign of emotion. He hedges on many of the issues, saying he needs time to gather more information and think about them.

Matthews speaks loudly in an accent that reflects his Iowa roots. His sentences meander and are often hard to follow. He appears to feel compelled to have a stance on every issue.

The closing statements the two candidates gave at the June 30 candidate forum illustrate those stylistic differences.

Williams has said that an advantage to electing him is that he will be effective, given his connections.

Matthews says he will listen to different points of view. In a written response to a question from Oconee Patch, he said he would use his expertise in social media to make himself an effective communicator with his constituents.

No Democratic candidate has done well in the 113th District as currently configured. Democrat Becky Vaughn got 38.9 percent of the vote in her race against incumbent Bob Smith in 2006, and Suzy Compere got 27.5 percent of the vote in the November 2010 race against Hank Huckaby.

Huckaby entered the race when Smith announced he would not seek reelection and then resigned in April to become chancellor of the University System of Georgia.

Matthews got 26.7 percent of the votes in the June 21 first round of the special election. He was running against Republicans Williams, Alan Alexander and Sarah Bell. Williams got 38.8 percent.

But only 3,923, or 11.0 percent, of the active voters turned out. That figure was 12.7 percent in Oconee County.

As of the end of the day today, 1,005 voters cast ballots in early voting in Oconee County, according to Carole Amos from the election office. That compares with the 775 who voted in early voting for the June 21 election.

Early voting ended at 5 p.m. today.

Oconee County voters make up 59.7 percent of the 35,750 registered voters in the 113th district.

The early voting figures suggests turnout in the runoff could be higher than in the June 21 election. It also is possible that simply a larger number of persons used early voting in the middle of the summer.

To be successful, Matthews needs to energize his base but also reach out to those who are willing to consider voting for someone who is not running as a Republican.

His seeming attack on Norris has not helped, but he also said he did not agree with 10th District Congressman Paul Broun in the second debate and made an unsolicited criticism of the Republican Party in his interview on July 5 with Tim Bryant.

“I think there are a lot of problems with the economy,” he said. “It seems to me the Georgia Republican Party has kind of become the party of uncertainty in the state of Georgia in the way that business has been done.”

Williams can afford to be more partisan, as he needs to make sure people who normally vote Republican go to the polls.

With Bell, who positioned herself as the most conservative candidate in the June 21 first round, out of the race, Williams does need to make sure that the conservative base is motivated to come to the polls on Tuesday.

If Williams were to be elected and wants to stay in the job, he probably would be very difficult to defeat next time around. As part of the majority, he could help create a district, using his southern Oconee County base, that would almost guarantee that.

Williams has hedged on whether he would support a change in the district that would see Oconee County split between districts. The legislature will take up redistricting when it meets next month.

In the July 6 interview with Bryant, Williams said simply “Everything is up for discussion at this point.”

Matthews, as a Democrat, probably would find it difficult to hold his position in 2012.

As a member of the minority party, he would have little influence on how the districts will be drawn.

Matthews could easily be put into a district with someone likely to defeat him when he comes up for reelection.

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Readers caught two typos, which I corrected in this version. I also made an error in the number of early voters in Oconee County in the June 21 election and have corrected that. I thank the readers for pointing out the typos and apologize for the errors.

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Almost all of what I have written above comes from three sources:

*The three candidate forums. Video from each is at the Oconee County Observations Vimeo site.

*The four interviews 1340 WGAU radio journalist Tim Bryant did on these dates:

May 4 with Williams

May 19 with Matthews

July 5 with Matthews

July 6 with Williams

All are available in the archives of 1340 WGAU.

*Written comments the two candidates gave to Oconee Patch in response to submitted questions.

Oconee County Board of Commissioners Continues Discussion of Courthouse Annex Purchase

Topic of Executive Session

Negotiations between Oconee County and the owners of the land and two buildings housing the Courthouse Annex are progressing, and County Attorney Daniel Haygood said last night he expects the issue to come before the public and the Board of Commissioners relatively soon.

The commissioners went into a 15-minute executive session after its regular open meeting last night.

Haygood told me at the end of the session that he had briefed the commissioners in the executive session on his negotiations with the owners of the property.

The land and two buildings are owned by 22 North Main LLC. The property is located at 22 N. Main St. across from the courthouse.

Ray B. Burruss Jr. of Athens is listed as the agent in the county tax records. According to those records, the current owner acquired the property from Elizabeth Dolvin in 2005. The property is commonly referred to as the “Dolvin property.”

Haygood said the purchase price remains $1 million, and that the offer for continued lease of the land is likely to be at a slightly lower rate than the current lease rate.

According to Alan Theriault, administrative officer for the county, the current lease requires the county to pay $6,942.60 per month, or $83,311.20 per year, for the two buildings.

Haygood and Theriault said that all discussions about purchase of the property have been handled by Haygood.

I asked Theriault on July 1 for a copy of written correspondence regarding the offer from the courthouse annex property owners.

Theriault told me at the beginning of last night’s regular meeting that the only written documents he had discovered on the matter are covered by attorney-client privilege and cannot be released without approval of Haygood.

Haygood said after the meeting and executive session he is “getting close” to being able to release details of the negotiations.

The Citizen Advisory Committee on Land Use and Transportation Planning Committee reviewed the possible purchase of the courthouse annex property at its June 14 meeting. Committee Chairman Abe Abouhamdan reported on that review to the BOC on June 28.

The Committee voted to recommend that the Board go forward with the purchase.

After Abouhamdan made his report, however, no member of the BOC spoke, and no indication was given of the timetable for a decision.

Theriault told me on July 1 that he did not know when the BOC would take up the matter again.

“I have gotten no indication one way or the other on what happens next,” he said.

Haygood asked for the executive session last night.

The Board began exploring possible purchase of the property during budget discussions this year as a way of saving the county money.

The county has unspent money in Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax funds that it could use for purchase of the property, and, by owning the property, the county could save the cost of the lease.

Two citizens, Pam Hendrix and Mike Power, spoke strongly against that purchase at the June 28 meeting. Hendrix was a candidate for Superior Court Judge in the November election. Power is a local businessman and property owner.

Several members of the LUTPC had expressed concerns about citizen reaction to the purchase at the June 14 meeting, but Abouhamdan did not raise those concerns in his report to the commissioners.

“Even though we’ve got these SPLOST funds available to us that we can basically write a check, how easy is this going to be to explain to John Q. Taxpayer that we are spending $1 million while everybody else in the county is cutting budgets?” Shane Carson asked.

Abouhamdan also misstated the size of the property and the assessed value in his presentation to the Board of Commissioners.

The property is approximately 0.6 acre, according to records county Strategic and Long-Range Planning Director Wayne Provost gave to the land use committee.

County Chief Appraiser Allen Skinner told the committee at the beginning of the June 14 Land Use and Transportation Planning Committee meeting, which Abouhamdan chaired, the assessed value of the property. It also is listed on the tax records as $662,491.

Abouhamdan also misstated the vote at the June 14 meeting.

“We had 14 members and we had a unanimous vote,” he told the commissioners.

The minutes of the meeting indicate that only nine members were present.

The BOC must make any decision about purchase of the property in an open meeting. It could take such a vote in an open meeting at the end of an executive session, but the Board usually puts these matters on the agenda of regular meetings.

The BOC is scheduled to meet in an agenda setting session on July 26. The next regular meeting is scheduled for Aug. 2.

Agendas usually are released to the public a few days before the meetings.

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The full video of the Land Use and Transportation Planning Committee meeting of June 14 is available on the Oconee County Observations Vimeo site.

Oconee County’s Campbell Center Gets New Leadership While It Awaits Final Decision on Future

Focus Remains on Land

The J. Phil Campbell Sr. Natural Resource Conservation Center on Experiment Station Road outside Watkinsville begins the week under new leadership.

Dwight Fisher took early retirement on Saturday, ending his two-year term as research leader and his 14 years as a scientist at the 1,100-acre federal Agriculture Research Service (ARS) site.

Deborah Brennan, area director for ARS based at the Richard B. Russell Agricultural Research Center on College Station Road in Athens, will assume the position of acting research leader on Tuesday.

Dwight Fisher, 6/30/2011

Fisher is the first of the six research scientists and 19 technical support staff at the Campbell Center to leave as the Center approaches the end of this fiscal year on Sept. 30 and its near-certain closing.

Under conditions of the 2012 Agriculture Appropriations Bill, passed by the House on June 16, funding for the Center would end with the current fiscal year and the farmland in Oconee County would be made available to the University of Georgia for continued agricultural research purposes. The bill is now before the Senate.

The University has expressed an interest in taking over the property.

President Barack Obama had not included the $2.9 million for the Campbell Center in the budget he submitted to Congress for the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1.

The Agriculture Appropriations Bill approved by the House cut $7 billion from Obama’s request. The remaining $125.5 billion in funding includes the U.S. Department of Agriculture, under which ARS falls.

The Agriculture Appropriations Bill passed the House by a vote of 217-203, with all Democrats and 19 Republicans voting against it. Paul Broun, representing Oconee County in Congress, was one of the Republican who voted against the bill.

Rep. Brown had called for even deeper cuts in agriculture funding.

On May 27 the University of Georgia officially posted notice that it was seeking bidders for its 522-acre Plant Sciences Farm on Hog Mountain Road across from North Oconee High School.

Two bids were received by the June 27 deadline, for $11,440,000 from Townley Family Partnership LLP and $522,000 from Richard H. Garrett Jr.

Townley Family Partnership lists its address as 4601 Hog Mountain Road, while Garrett lists his address as 1050 Planter’s Trail, Bogart.

Tony and Elizabeth Townley own the land east of and abutting the Plant Sciences Farm that is listed in the county tax records with the 4601 Hog Mountain Road address.

Tony Townley is one of the founders of Zaxby’s and currently its chief financial officer.

J.H. Dorsey, director of real estate and space management at the University of Georgia, told me on Friday that the university, consistent with state law, would not release the actual bids until a decision by the university had been made. He said he expected that decision to be made later this month.

Fisher said when I talked to him on Thursday afternoon that he had not known until February that the Campbell Center had been targeted for elimination. Fisher said he advised those under him of the likelihood the Campbell Center would be closed at that time.

All staff will be offered alternative assignments if the Center does close, Fisher said, but the assignments can be almost anywhere in the country.

Fisher, 57, was among those offered early retirement, and he opted to accept it.

Fisher said he had to decide whether to stay on at the Center to see it through the almost certain closing or turn to other things immediately.

“The executive branch says close it. The House (of Representatives) says close it. The idea that the Senate will disagree is really slim,” Fisher said. “For me it is time to go write papers.”

He said he will use the time to work with collaborators writing up results of the research he has completed at the Campbell Center.

An expert in grazing systems and forage utilization, Fisher earned his doctorate in 1985 in crop science and biomath at North Carolina State University. He lives in Athens.

Fisher came to the Campbell Center in July of 1997.

The Campbell Center consists of four separate tracts of land, and Fisher took me on a tour of all of them except the South Unit when we met on Thursday.

Our first stop, given my expressed interest in the topic, was a 6-acre plot of land on Hog Mountain Road across from the University of Georgia Horticulture Farm. This is part of the North Unit.

P1

The plot, Fisher said, is designated P1, and is internationally famous. It has not been plowed since 1974, and, through a “double crop-no till” practice, the scientists at the Campbell Center have turned what was depleted red soil to fertile black land.

People come from all over the world to see the plot, according to Fisher.

“If they are interested in sustainable agriculture and conservation tillage, they will stop to see it,” he said.

The Campbell Center was started on Jan. 1, 1937, to conduct research and develop procedures to deal with soil erosion, which plagued the area, state and region.

One of the great values of the Campbell Center is that it has detailed research records going back to that time on many of the fields on the farms, according to Fisher.

The Center’s land also is dotted with research infrastructure, such as sampling wells, flumes with water flow measuring devices, refrigerators for storing water samples and solar panels to power these devices.

Fisher said there is no way to really assess the value of these facilities and resources.

The Center’s 500 head of cattle technically already are owned by the University of Georgia.

“Everybody here is focused on taking care of the land until they hand it to somebody else,” he said.

Fisher said on Thursday that he will miss “the land and the people” once he has walked away from the Center.

“We have some close relations here. It is almost like a family.”

Georgia House District 113 Candidates Respond to Questions on Banks, Blogs and Oconee County Land Purchases

More Questions Than Time

About 60 people listened for an hour tonight as candidates Dan Matthews and Chuck Williams, seeking to represent Oconee County and parts of three neighboring counties in the Georgia House of Representatives, answered questions on a variety of issues tossed at them by moderator Tim Bryant.

Most of the questions had been covered in previous meetings of the two candidates, but a few were new and some had slightly different angles.

Williams, former president of North Georgia Bank, which failed earlier this year, said in response to the first question posed to him by Bryant that he “accepted responsibility for everything that occurred at the bank.”

But he said the bank failed because it was tied to the local residential building industry, and other banks in similar communities also failed.

Matthews responded that Oconee State Bank, in the same market, had not failed and that North Georgia Bank had been warned by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation of problems before the failure.

Matthews was asked to defend comments he has made on his political blog, where, according to the questioner, he often “is an outspoken critic” of those who don’t share his view.

The questioner said Matthews “crossed the line” in writing about the late Congressman Charles Norwood.

Matthews said he didn’t remember the comment but would look for it on his blog. Williams said he had a lot of respect for Norwood.

Williams was asked to explain the circumstances surrounding sale of family property in Watkinsville to the Oconee County Board of Education.

Williams said it was a simple transaction that involved no special favors. Matthews congratulated Williams on the profit he had made on the sale.

Matthews and Williams are the survivors of the June 21 special election called to replace Hank Huckaby, who resigned as representative to assume the position of chancellor of the University System of Georgia.

The two were the top voters getters in the field of four candidates in that race. Since no candidate got a majority of the votes cast, voters are being asked to return to the polls to select between them.

Matthews is running as a Democrat, while Williams is running as a Republican.

The district, made up of all of Oconee County and parts of Clarke, Morgan and Oglethorpe counties, has a record of electing Republican candidates.

The forum tonight was sponsored by the Oconee County Chamber of Commerce.

Bryant, a newsman for 1340 WGAU and FM 103.7, was asked by the Chamber to select from questions posed in advance from the audience and to him via email prior to the program.

Bryant began the session saying he had more questions than the candidates would have time to answer in the one hour allowed for the event.

The forum was broadcast live of WGAU and FM 103.7.

The full video of the forum is below:

Candidate Forum June 30, 2011 from Lee Becker on Vimeo.

Oconee County Commissioners To Get Report on Courthouse Annex Purchase

Abouhamdan on Agenda

The Oconee County Board of Commissioners is scheduled to take up the possible purchase of the “Dolvin” Property–located across the street from the courthouse–at its agenda-setting meeting tomorrow night.

The agenda item comes in the form of a report from the Citizen Advisory Committee for Land Use and Transportation Planning, which voted unanimously at its meeting on June 14 to recommend to the county that it purchase the property.

The only issue for the citizen committee members was the property price.

Committee members were told by Wayne Provost, director of strategic and long-range planning for the county, that the owners of the property are asking $1 million and have said they will not accept any lower offer.

The assessed value of the property on the county’s tax roll is $662,491.

Several committee members said they thought it would be hard to convince citizens in the county that it is a good idea to purchase the property at 50 percent more than its assessed value in such a difficult economic time.

Provost, who is the liaison person for the county to the committee, told them the justification was simple.

The county has the money for the purchase in unspent Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax funds, those monies are designated as for projects such as the courthouse, and purchasing the property rather than continuing to lease it will save the county more than $400,000 over the next five years.

After an hour of discussion, the citizen committee voted unanimously to recommend that the Board of Commissioners go forward with the purchase.

Nine of the 14 committee members were present. Abe Abouhamdan, who chairs the committee, usually does not record his vote, though he left little doubt he supported the motion.

Provost brought Allen Skinner, head of the county Property Appraisal Department, to the June 14 meeting of the Land Use and Transportation Planning Committee to help the Committee address the gap between the appraised value–which comes from Skinner–and the asking price.

Skinner recommended that the committee focus on the two buildings that make up the “Dolvin Property,” which the county officially refers to as the Courthouse Annex.

The tax documents indicate the first building, 5,576 square-feet in size, was built in 1993. The second, at 3,640 square feet, was built in 1995.

Both buildings have two stories, with brick exteriors.

The 0.6-acre property also includes a concrete-paved parking lot for approximately 25 vehicles.

Skinner has assessed those buildings as worth $62 per square foot, and he presented the committee with his assessments of 10 other properties he felt were comparable in some ways and that had sold in 2010 or just earlier.

The range in assessed value of those properties was from $33 per square foot to $144 per square foot.

Committee Chairman Abouhamdan repeatedly told Skinner that “location” is key, and it is hard to make comparisons of the sort he was making. Abouhamdan said the location across the street from the courthouse makes the property in question particularly valuable to the county.

“It would be worth more to the county than to anybody else,” Skinner conceded.

In fact, much of what appears to be frontage on Main Street for the Courthouse Annex actually already is owned by the county. The county also owns the adjoining property on which the Eagle Tavern sits, and Watkinsville owns a tiny piece of land between the Tavern property and the courthouse annex.

The courthouse annex property itself mostly fronts on First Street, which, Skinner said, limits its value except to the county.

The county first signed a lease for the Courthouse Annex property beginning on Nov. 13, 2006, according to Alan Theriault, administrative officer for the county. The county’s five-year lease on the property expires on Nov. 30 of this year.

According to Theriault, the current lease requires the county to pay $6,942.60 per month or $83,311.20 per year.

Provost told the land use committee he “thinks” the offer from the owner is to renew the lease at this same amount for five years.

The first building, facing North Main Street, houses the Planning Department and Code Enforcement. The second building, on First Street, provides space for the Sheriff’s Office Investigator, the Environment Health Department and the coroner.

The tax records list the property owner as 22 North Main LLC, with Ray B. Burruss Jr. of Athens as the agent. The current owner acquired the property from Elizabeth Dolvin in 2005, according to the tax records.

Skinner also told the Committee that two unimproved properties had sold in Watkinsville in 2009 that could be used to help assess the property beneath the two buildings on the Courthouse Annex complex. He has assessed that land at $150,000 per acre.

The first is the property the Board of Education purchased from Chuck and David Williams for a future office building. That land sold for $100,000 per acre, and Skinner acknowledged that some think the BOE paid too much.

The other was a lot subsequently used for a single-family residence. It sold for $100,000 per acre.

No one asked Skinner about this at the meeting, but if the county purchases the property, it would be removed from the tax rolls, resulting in annual losses at current tax rates of $778 to the city of Watkinsville, $4,637 to the Oconee County School system, $1,983 to the county, and $66 to the state.

The computations are based on the current millage rates, which Skinner reviewed with me by telephone today.

I was not able to attend that June 14 meeting, but Russ Page did and made a video of it for me.

Page said that he and a reporter for The Oconee Enterprise were the only persons present other than Skinner, Provost and the nine committee members.

The Athens Banner-Herald reported on the meeting in its edition today under the headline, “Oconee urged to buy buildings.”

Committee member comments indicated considerable reservation about the purchase, given the price, and no one urged the county to take action.

Provost is the only person quoted in the Banner-Herald story, and the story provides Provost’s justification for the property purchase.

As is usually the case at land use committee meetings, citizens were not given a chance to speak until after the committee had voted on the action.

The video indicates Page did speak and offered observations about the property under consideration.

Abouhamdan is scheduled to report to the BOC on his committee’s recommendation as the eighth item on the agenda tomorrow night. The meeting starts at 7 p.m. in the courthouse.

Democrat Matthews Did Less Well Than Candidate a Year Earlier in Oconee County House Race

Got Help From Clarke

Democrat Dan Matthews ran slightly weaker in his home county of Oconee yesterday than did Democrat Suzy Compere from Morgan County in November of 2010, but Matthews managed to come in second in the special election for the 113th Georgia House seat by doing considerably better in Clarke County than Compere did.

Matthews got 18.7 percent of the vote in Oconee County in the race against three Republicans while Compere got 20.0 percent in her race against Republican Hank Huckaby last year in Oconee County.

Matthews was 765 votes behind front-runner Chuck Williams and only a single vote ahead of third place finisher Sarah Bell in the Oconee County tally.

In Clarke County, however, Matthews got 54.8 percent of the vote, compared with 47.9 percent for Compere in November of last year. Williams got only 15.9 percent of the vote in Clarke County, just ahead of Alan Alexander with 14.8 percent and Bell with 14.5 percent.

With the votes from Morgan and Oglethorpe counties included with those of Oconee and Clarke counties, Matthews finished with 26.7 percent of the vote, compared with Compere's 27.5 percent in 2010.

That total of 26.7 percent put Matthews in second place behind Williams with 38.8 percent and allowed Matthews to move to the July 19 runoff against Williams. The runoff is necessary because no candidate got more than 50 percent of the vote.

Bell ended with 18.3 percent of the vote and Alexander with 16.2 percent.

Compere did almost no campaigning last year while Matthews, long active in the Oconee County Democratic Party, has been very visible during the short campaign period.

But Compare had only one opponent, while Matthews had three, all also from Oconee County.

Huckaby, also from Oconee County, resigned in late April to take over as chancellor of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.

The 113th House District consists of all of Oconee County, parts of western and southern Clarke County and Winterville, as well as parts of western Oglethorpe County and parts of northern Morgan County.

Overall turnout of the 35,750 active registered voters in the district yesterday was 11.0 percent, but it was 12.7 percent in Oconee County, 9.1 percent in Clarke County, 7.6 percent in Morgan County, and 7.4 percent in Oglethorpe County.

Alexander ran strongest in Oglethorpe County, where he had 29.0 percent of the vote. Bell did best in Morgan County, with 26.1 percent. Matthews ran strongest in Clarke County with his 54.8 percent, and Williams had his highest percentage in Oconee County, with 47.1 percent.

Matthews’ weakest showing was in Oconee County.

Inside Oconee County, Alexander did best in Dark Corner in the far western part of the county. Bell did best among voters who cast their ballots at the Civic Center in the center of the county.

Matthews’ best showing was at City Hall in Watkinsville.

Williams ran strongest in Antioch in the south of the county.

Williams is from the southern part of the county, while the other three contenders are from Watkinsville or nearby.

Voters who cast their ballots before election day were more likely to be Williams voters than voters overall, and less likely to vote for Alexander and Bell.

Turnout on July 19 could be important.

Matthews will have to get a lot of new voters or pick up former supporters of Bell and Alexander to overcome the gap with Williams in the tally from yesterday.

ADDENDUM 6/23/2011: Compere got 5,580 votes in 2010, or more than five times the number Matthews got in the June 21 election, meaning that Matthews has a lot of potential voters to attract to the polls on July 19. Williams got only 1,521 votes on June 21.

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A two-sheet spreadsheet that I used to examine the vote is here.

Oconee County Budget Contains No Millage Rate Increase, A Lower Draw on Savings and Fee Increases

June 21 Vote Scheduled

When the Oconee County Board of Commissioners meets on Tuesday night, it will be to review a $33.2 million budget for Fiscal Year 2012 that is balanced without a millage rate increase.

The General Fund component of the budget, which is $1.3 million lower than for the current fiscal year, includes a transfer of $505,787 from the county’s surplus. To balance the current fiscal year budget, the county transferred $1,157,894 from the surplus account.

The budget also includes significant fee increases for parks and recreation, water and sewer.

Funding for law enforcement, the jail, public works and parks and recreation–the largest items in the 2012 General Fund budget–are all down from a year ago.

The sheriff cut $329,234 from his law enforcement budget and $154,200 from the operation of the jail. He projected jail revenues to remain flat at $217,500.

The Public Works Department budget is down $200,693 from a year earlier.

The budget for the Parks and Recreation Department is $179,137 lower than in the current fiscal year, which ends on June 30. Parks and Recreation will raise an additional $102,160 this coming year with fee increases.

Fees for most youth programs will go up $10 per person. The same is true for most summer sports camps. Fitness program membership will double in cost.

The $19.4 million General Fund budget is the largest part of the overall $33.2 million budget for the county, which is $2.9 million lower than the current total budget of $36.1 million.

The total budget includes $4.8 million in spending from the Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax funds, $3.4 million in spending from special revenue funds such as the emergency telephone system and the hotel/motel tax, and $7.1 million for the Utility Department.

The Utility Department budget is up 11.3 percent from the current budget of $6.4 million and includes rate increases for both water and sewer use. Base fee increases are 6.1 percent and 8.3 percent respectively.

The total budget includes $1.4 million of transfer of funds within those separate accounts, bringing the overall figure to $33.2 rather than $34.6 million.

Citizens will get a chance to comment on the budget on Tuesday night, the first of two called meetings to provide for public hearings.

The meeting on Tuesday is scheduled to start at 7 p.m. in the courthouse.

The second called meeting is scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. on June 21 and is to be followed by a meeting of the commissioners at 7 p.m., at which they are to vote on the budget. Both of these meetings will be in the courthouse.

Jeff Benko, April 2010

County Finance Director Jeff Benko presented the budget to the commissoners on June 7 with a memo explaining the changes he had made since the commissioners last reviewed the budget in detail on May 26.

He also gave a briefing after the meeting for reporters from the Athens Banner-Herald, The Oconee Enterprise and OconeePatch, all of whom were in attendance.

The county also has put details of the proposed 2012 budget as well as details of budgets for the last three years on the county’s web site.

In the memo Benko gave to commissioners he said balancing the budget was a “very demanding process.” He said the budget maintains the “fiscal stability of Oconee County looking long range.”

Benko said “we will persevere through this challenging time as a more efficient organization.”

Benko gave me a copy of his memo and a spreadsheet he gave commissioners. It provides details on how each department responded to requests for cuts from current funding levels.

It also contains $110,659 in revenue not shown in earlier versions of the 2012 budget, including $89,000 from the Parks and Recreation Department.

The new budget reflects closing of the community center in Bishop and the Daniells House on Founders Boulevard. The Civic Center budget, which includes the Daniells House, is $52,838 less for Fiscal Year 2012 than for the current year.

Benko told me in an email message on June 8 that the budget does not reflect any savings from a proposed early retirement program. The costs of such an incentive program also are not included.

Benko said the commissioners have not indicated “when and if” such a plan will be put into place.

The county currently has 236 full-time employees, Benko said.

Many department heads had indicated, according to the spreadsheet Benko gave me, that they could not reduce their budgets without cutting personnel.

As I wrote in a posting on May 16, the largest item in the Utility Department budget is debt service.

To pay off bonds sold to finance utility projects, the department in 2012 will spend $3.2 million or 44.0 percent of its budget. This is an increase of 6.7 percent from the amount it will have spent on debt payments in the current fiscal year.

Of the debt services for next year, $890,000, or 27.9 percent, is from the Hard Labor Creek Reservoir project, a partnership of Oconee and Walton counties. If that figure were absent from the Utility department budget, the 2012 budget would be $6,220,500.

After I wrote that story, I asked Benko to give me the payment schedule for the $19.5 million bond sold for Hard Labor Creek in March of 2008.

That schedule shows that annual interest rates range from 4 percent to 4.5 percent and that the maturity date is February of 2038.

The Fiscal Year 2012 budget includes $890,000 in interest, but no payment against principal. The schedule does not call for payments against the principal until 2015. That year and for the remainder of the bond’s life the county is scheduled to make a payment of $1.4 million

The total cost of the bond repayment in 2038 is scheduled to be $38.3 million, representing the $19.5 principal and $18.8 in interest.

The counties do not have enough money to build the reservoir or water treatment plant and are seeking state funding to cover some of those costs.