Landscape designer Jane Bath is unhappy.
She says developers in Oconee County are planting too many red oaks and red maples, planting them too close together and in straight lines, and planting them too close to power lines.
She says the problem is with the county’s Unified Development Code (UDC) and the county’s planners.
The Oconee County Citizen Advisory Committee on Recreation Affairs last night added $5.5 million to the list of requests to go to the Board of Commissioners for inclusion on the ballot next spring as part of the 2015 Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax.
The Committee said it really needs $10 million in parks, recreation and historic site funds, but it prioritized its list to include money to complete three projects at Veterans Park on Hog Mountain Road and make a variety of overall improvements to parks throughout the system.
Six farmers filled out applications by the Oct. 31 deadline telling the county they would like their property to be considered for inclusion under the county’s reconfigured farmland protection program.
Five of the six farmers already had their property on the list of 32 farms under consideration by the Partnership for Farmland Protection, the citizen group that ran the county’s farmland protection program until the Board of Commissioners appointed its own review committee on Aug. 6.
Fifty-one volunteers this morning collected and hauled out an estimated 1,500 pounds of trash from the Oconee County side of McNutt Creek in a small area near the Macon Highway bridge over the creek.
The volunteers were recruited and organized by the Keep Oconee County Beautiful Commission as part of the state Rivers Alive Cleanup, a program of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Environmental Protection Division.
The Oconee County Industrial Development Authority voted earlier today to ask the Oconee County Board of Commissioners to earmark $4.6 million in the 2015 Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax for its economic development projects.
The IDA gets no funds from the current SPLOST, approved by voters in 2009 and continuing through the end of 2015, and the Authority said it wanted to get its request before the BOC so it can have its projects included in the next tax.
CAAT Holdings LLC has dismissed its suit against the Oconee County Board of Commissioners, dropping its assertion that the commissioners abused their power and acted arbitrarily when they denied a request for a change in the minimum size of dwellings in Pebble Creek subdivision south of Watkinsville.
County Attorney Daniel Haygood announced the resolution of the suit against the county at the end of the BOC meeting on Oct. 29.
The Oconee County Board of Commissioners approved a series of modifications to the county’s Unified Development Code last night, but it decided the existing code language that excludes chickens and other fowl from all but agricultural acreage should remain in place.
B.R. White, director of the county’s Planning Department, told the Board that the possibility of changing the code to allow “poultry and other domesticated fowl” into subdivisions has been “very controversial.”
