 Welcome to Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center, the John Drew Auditorium at the hospital on Prince Avenue in Athens. Tim Bryant with 16, if I counted correctly, 16 candidates who will be on your ballot in 36 days, actually sooner than that with the early voting that starts two weeks from today. We're going to have one-on-one conversations with candidates for mayor, including the incumbent Kelly Gertz and his five challengers, and candidates for seats on the Athens-Clarke County Commission. We're going to speak with each of them for seven minutes, six to seven minutes each, and with that tie-to-time frame, we're gonna dive right into the issues, no opening statements, no closing statements. We're gonna get right down to business. We're gonna, first of all, welcome each of you who came out tonight. Would you let the radio audience know that you're here? Tell the radio audience, hello. Hello. Hello. Hi, I say the radio audience. We're also streaming at wgauradio.com. Various apps and websites I know nothing about are carrying this event live this evening, and we'll save it later for Facebook and such. We're on Facebook Live, the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce website, as well, Facebook page. I'm frequently asking, in fact, I was talking to one of the candidates earlier, do you ever get nervous as you address a live audience that's in the room with you? Typically, I don't see an audience. Typically, I don't even know that it's there. I'm well aware that you were here tonight. Now, I wouldn't say nervous. I would say that I'm more focused on trying to avoid mistakes because mistakes linger. Mistakes come back to haunt you. Our mistakes last for years. I mentioned this earlier. There are still people, one of them in this room who will remind me from time to time of an event 20-some-odd years ago. Very new to Athens, not all that much time in radio. What I meant to say in discussing the Lady Dogs basketball game of the night before. What I intended to say was that the Lady Dogs went to Auburn and got knocked off. That is not what came out. And 20 years later, I still hear about that mistake. We'll try to avoid those kind of mistakes, at least I will tonight. And we'll get right down to business with our candidates beginning with, and these candidates, the order of speaking was drawn by a random lot. And the first lot, as it happens, fells to the incumbent Kelly Gertz, who is seated to my left. Mayor Gertz, thanks for coming out this evening. Thank you, Tim. First question, and again, submitted by the audience, can we please increase the police presence downtown? Tim, I appreciate you being here to moderate and I appreciate the chamber hosting and Piedmont Athens Regional being a part of this great event. I do wanna note that what we have done is seek to fill every vacant police position, like every public safety agency across the nation, the Athens-Clarke County Police Department has vacancies. And so what we have done is we have pushed the pay up this current fiscal year to $47,000 for a first year officer with a $3,000 signing bonus. You're gonna see that go up in the budget that I just am about to submit to the commission tomorrow to go up another 6%. And so we believe that raising those wages is gonna be the critical thing to fill those necessary positions. I don't know if you walk around with this number in your head or not. I said vacancies, how many at any given time? Or do you know? We've got a little over three dozen vacancies. Out of an department that has a... 225 sworn officers. What about the so-called housing crisis in Athens? Are any number of efforts that have been going for any number of years? Speak to what you're trying to do now and define success for us. Well, ultimately what we want is everybody who lives in Athens or works in Athens to be able to afford a place in Athens. And we know that we're challenged from a number of fronts. In any magnetic community in the United States right now, there's a housing supply problem. Construction simply has not kept up with demand. We know that in the 2020 census, there were 255,000 residents of Athens and contiguous counties and in the most recent census, more than 380,000 people. We don't have that many more bedrooms. And so we need to make sure that we're increasing supply. And so we've done a number of things. We've just passed two weeks ago an inclusionary zoning ordinance that's one of the most forward-leaning planning and zoning ordinances in the state of Georgia. And it's gonna incentivize redevelopment of former strip malls, commercial facilities, and multi-family facilities so that we get that construction that we so desperately need. And what it's also gonna do is create a permanently affordable band of those because we know that some of the challenge is for people on the lower end of the income spectrum. And we know that, of course, housing is also connected to so many other things. It's connected to how many affordable or good wage jobs there are in the community. So we've also sought to push up the number of high wage jobs in this community so fewer people are challenged by the price point. Can you point to communities around the South, around the country? This has worked in this community, the inclusionary zoning. Are there examples? Yes, I'd point folks to Madison, Wisconsin. I'd point people to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Those and a number of other communities are ones we looked to when we put this together. We also worked with the local development community because we wanted to make sure that the incentives that were embedded in that plan were ones that they would take advantage of. And they wholeheartedly said that that is the case. Talking of Mayor Kelly Gertz, can you do this and balance historic preservation? Absolutely. There's no doubt. A big part of the firmament of this community is having these beautiful, grand historic structures, and in some cases, modest historic structures that really reflect the entire more than 200 year history of Athens-Clarke County. But what we also know is that we've got plenty of asphalt parking lots and things that were really built for temporary or short-term use. So metal-sided buildings lining Atlanta Highway and Lexington Highway, we know are not places that were really built for the long haul. And those are places where we're gonna see significant redevelopment. We already have public infrastructure in those places. We've got state highways, we've got broadband, we've got water, and we've got sewer in those places and public transit. So we know they're poised for higher density and for the housing that we need for our next generation. You mentioned economic development and jobs and wages. Talk about the County Commission effort to beef up wages locally. I know you control what you pay government employees. Talk about efforts there and efforts beyond. So obviously we're very proud of the support we provide for our own workforce. We now have a floor of $15 an hour for our lowest-paid employees. And we've moved employees' wages up, as I mentioned, with police officers and other public safety agents earlier. And when our Economic Development Department is thinking about the private sector, what we are wanting to do is make sure that we're attracting and building those high-wage jobs. And so if you look at just the last couple of years, we've added over 100 high-five-figure and six-figure jobs at Bowringer Engelheim, an animal vaccine manufacturer. And some of those jobs are jobs for which you just need a technical certificate of credit for math and tech. And on the other end, they're jobs for which a PhD will fit you. We've also worked with the University of Georgia and there are many research and development activities. And so RWDC, that now occupies the former DuPont facility on Moore's Grove Road, is one where we have over 200 high-wage jobs. And they were birthed at the New Materials Institute right on the University of Georgia campus and could have gone anywhere in the country. And in fact, there were a number of localities you tried to nab them, but we engaged and we continued to stay at the table to land them right here. About a minute left, minute and a half here. Four years in office, you want another four. Give me, in about a minute, something that you really have focused on in four years. You think you got a little more work to do on it. You want to improve and maybe finish in the next four. So one of the things that I always noticed when I was in my public education job just before taking office as mayor and I would visit Monroe or Millageville or Habersham County or Gwinnett County and head back into Athens, is that as you get to the border of our community, we've got a lot of redevelopment to do and a lot of beautification to do on those key corridors. And so we've made some strides. So if you're coming in on Epps Bridge Parkway now, you notice those beautiful median plantings and you see the same thing on Danielsville Road, but we have dozens of other conduits coming into this community where we can restore beautification as existed here well before people lived in what's now Athens-Clarke County. All right, Mayor Kelly Gertz, congratulations on the first four. We'll see you about the next four. Thanks for your time this evening. Thanks so much. Again, we are at John Drew Auditorium, Piedmont-Athens Regional Medical Center, candidates for them. Speaking with candidates for mayor, the early voting starting two weeks from today, the election day proper on May 24th, which is I think 36 days, joined now by Pearl Hall, Pearl Hall, candidate for mayor, retired from the Clark County School System, not terribly long ago. Grab the microphone and spend a moment talking about what you learned in that job that you would apply to this one should you be elected Mayor of Athens. Let me first thank each of you for coming out tonight. I really appreciate it. Tim, thank you so much. What would apply me for this job is that I have many leadership skills, not many that you would think working with parents every day, working with the principal, many different principals, school boards, calling, wanting no answers to many questions, working with parents whose children one way or another, that I feel honored and happy to serve each one of those in any capacity that I could. You just heard the mayor speak to the police presence downtown. That's a common question, question submitted by listeners. Your thoughts on police activity downtown specifically. Too much, not enough, just right. Well, I think understanding law enforcement need competitive salaries. And I always wonder how many peoples from Athens is born, raised and know the force as well as the community. That is one thing I think the officer need to learn. The community and the people in the community. I know it's hard to do, but we have to figure out a way to learn the people and the community in order to keep our crime down and many other things. Talking with Pearl Hall candidate for mayor, same topic, what do you want to see in our next police chief? And somebody pointing out, I think it's four police chiefs in eight years now. What do you want to see in the next police chief? Well, in the next police chief, I don't want to put down the chief that there is now. Because I think he has done pretty well to be expected. But I want to see more interaction with the community. I want him to go around and figure out what need to be done. And I noticed a lot of focus is on within the Clark County School District and the community. I have a list of over a thousand streets that my campaign and I have traveled. Never heard of these streets before. And I look at some of these neighborhood as we have traveled around and we only focus in on the center of Athens around the Rock Spring Barney because her road and all in that area. We never been out to the outskirt of Athens. I'm sure they have, but there are some roads and streets and people that need our help other than the intercity of Athens. Let's stretch out a little bit more. And I have over a thousand streets as the mayor know. And I tried to touch every one of those streets not spoken with anyone, but I have rolled those streets and say some of them is pitiful, but no one has ever been there according to those neighborhoods. Talk about that for a moment. Affordable housing, the mayor just addressed that. The commission has addressed that. What would you do as mayor to speak to the problem, the topic of affordable housing or the lack thereof? Tim, I have to be honest with you. I really have to understand what is affordable houses? Well, there's an easy definition. That's the house that I can afford. There is a more technical definition and I will confess that I don't know precisely, but it's based on a percentage of your income and how much of that percentage, I think it's 30% or something that is spent on housing. Then that's how we define it. I may be off on that figure, but it's a figure that is a percentage of income. So what I can say is affordable may be affordable for me, but may not be affordable for someone else. That's the way I look at affordable houses, because everybody can't afford the same type of home. If we did, we would be living in that area. So when we talk about affordable home, I kind of cringe on that because what may be affordable for some people may not be affordable for them. But I know the question that you're asking me, but I don't wanna just lay a foundation on that question due to the fact that everybody may look at me differently and say, hey, Pearl, your affordable house is not affordable to you, but it's affordable to the lady down the street. What do you think of the homeless encampment and the effort to make that work? The homeless, let me first thank the gentleman that run the houses and thank the community as well, because I might be wrong, but I don't think there's nobody in here has participated in one way or another to give to the homeless. Are you talking about Charles Hardy? Charles Hardy, I didn't wanna, you know, just, okay. I wanna thank Charles Hardy. And I wanna thank the many churches, as well as my church, the Ebenezer West. We all, under one way or another, participate in helping the homeless. And how do I wanna see the homeless? I want them off the street. But I wanna sit down with the commissioners and everyone to come up with a plan that will work better because everybody has a plan. But I can't just make a plan without seeing what the budget is. How can we do this? Where can we better fix this? I know North Avenue has an area. Willow Street has an area. There's people's everywhere. We don't know how many homeless there are. When I drive through Athens on some of these streets and I look up in these bushes and areas, my only crunch, because there are homeless everywhere. So the first thing we need to do is figure out where are all these homeless and then try to bring them to a place where we can get them fixed and ready for the next day or two. Pearl Hall, candidate for mayor. Thank you so much for coming out this evening. Spending time with us here. Appreciate you having me. Thank you. Next up, another candidate for mayor. I'll hand you that microphone. Benny Coleman, Benny Coleman III, candidate for mayor of Athens. Mr. Coleman, slide then, sit down, chat with us for a few minutes. Talk about yourself and what inspired you to make this run for the mayor's office. Well, I'm married, have a family of three kids, two grandkids, and I've been married for 40 years plus and I'm happy to be married. And the reason why- So you're trying to get you out of the house? Is that what this is? That's a good answer. True, true, but what made me decide to run for mayor is noticing how there's a difference between my black people here in Clark County and they well all people in the surrounding counties. I wanted to make a difference to show the young generation what an uneducated, college-wise person can do if they decide to help their community. Anybody have the right and the constitutional right that he has to run for office to serve their community? And that is one of the laws I firmly believe in, my right to serve our city. You said you wanted to serve an example for young folks as a candidate, as a mayor should you win? What would that look like? What would you do? Well, what I would do, I will unite us more together. I will have different meetings among the churches and communities and I will give an opportunity for young people to educate themselves by continuing going to school and having better behavior. I also would instruct one another how to build a generation of wealth. And I feel like our people don't have a generation of wealth and we depend too much on the government and we need to start depending on one another ourselves. Benny Coleman, candidate for mayor. You just heard our mayor, Kelly Gertz, a few moments ago talk about the budget that he'll be dealing with tomorrow, the Athens-Clarke County Commission meeting. What would you do? The budget is, if nothing else, a list of priorities. Here's what our government at any one moment in time prioritizes. What would your priorities be? Well, my priorities will be first to understand the budget. Since I'm a green person at this campaign, I don't know anything about the government yet, but what I will do, I have a point, a new group to revive me to tell me what's going on and I will study it and review it. And then I will come to a conclusion how to save money with the budget we currently have and how not to spend wastefully. And if it's possible, I will freeze the speed loss. I will freeze everything on the speed loss right now because I feel like- It's probably not possible, but I don't know. Being the mayor, you have a right to freeze it if it's constitutional or not, if it's within the law. I can say, hold it, we need to review this. What is the money being spent? How is the money being spent? What should we should do or what we shouldn't do with the money? And then once I understand how it's been spent or what we should and shouldn't do with the money, I will put in a better plan to help more people in Clark County, not just the one who answers the speed loss question who needed help, but the ones that the commission failed to represent. Do we in your estimation rely too much on special purpose, local options, sales taxes? Oh yes, we really do because it become a hinder to everybody. And I hate to say it, but I'm going to say it. In order to get something done in Clark County, you must bring a black person into it. You must make them feel like they're being belittled, they're lacking something, and then laws can be passed. But when we get in that field just as equal as everybody else that we have the same opportunity as everyone else does, I think we'll be much better off and that the whole community will be better off. Got about three and a half minutes. Solve the crime problem for us. What do we do about crime in Athens? The crime problem that we have in Clark County is more on one's actions. If you feel like you're an angry person, don't backlash when you get stopped by the police. Teach your kid to respect one another. Teach your kid to respect the police officer, everyone. And then that way sometimes we feel like when we are angry we tend to do things rationally. And that cause a big problem. Now let me interject here because that's a wonderful lesson in home. That's a great lesson from a pulpit. But you'd be the mayor. What's the role for the mayor to play in reducing the crime problem in Athens? Okay, housing. You can reduce the crime rate by having more housing, helping the homeless. You can reduce the crime rate by employment, having a better job, not necessarily a college degree type job, a higher type of living job. That's an average job someone making $15, $20 hour, giving people opportunities so their kids can go to a private school, not necessarily a public school. You can have the community as a mayor about taking money not just for beautification, but to help people in their daily lives. How do we attract the kind of jobs you're talking about? Well, they have been job what we said in the past. A lot of people don't like what we call factory jobs. Bring more factory jobs in if you have to. I mean, what's embarrassing about a factory? That's an honest job. Bring in plumbing, carpentry, like try anything that can help a young generation to be a wealth in affordable homes and everything. Again, talking with Benny Coleman, another couple of minutes here. Benny Coleman, third candidate for mayor of Athens. You touched on this and it's a very big question. I'm sorry, only about a minute and a half left to deal with this. Talk about race in Athens. What's your perspective? Obviously a black candidate, a black man. What's your thought on the power structure and the black person's place in it in Athens? Well, there's a division, a big division. It's not just black and white. The division is more on the black on black. We tend to overemphasize our power towards one another. We need to be more unified in this city. Being more unified, putting one another together and teaching our kids to respect one another, which will reduce the crime, which will increase salary to everyone, which will make a better life for everybody. And okay, when it comes to the division between white and black, there tend to be we want to live on one side of street, they want to live on the other side of street, but we want to travel the same street at the same time, there's confusion there. We all have to be unified and just like a bunch of aunts, we have to work together. All right, Benny Coleman, the third. Best of luck on the campaign trail. Thanks for coming out this evening. Thank you. Thank you. Mara Zanida, if you would come up. Again, for the benefit of the radio audience, you're listening to us from the John Drew Auditorium, Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center. Just turn in the corner here, halfway through our conversations with candidates for mayor of Athens. Join now by Mara Zanida, candidate for mayor of Athens. Thanks for coming out this evening. And talk about for a moment, what inspired you to get in this race? Well, first of all, thank you, Tim. And thank you everybody for coming tonight. What inspired me to come into the race was that I was starting to get involved with community issues. I started listening to concerns that people had. And I thought the best thing to do was to go out and speak to people and find out if there were concerns that were similar in one faction of Athens to the other. And I found out that there were. And the more I looked at the issues that were being brought up to the mayor and commissioner, the more I realized people did not go to the mayor and commissioner sessions. It was a very few amount of people. When I asked, why if you have these concerns, don't you go to the mayor and commissioner session meetings? To me, that would be normal to go and express your concerns to the mayor and the commissioner. But they said, well, we've done this for a long time and we're not being heard. I mean, we've spoken to the mayor and we're just not being heard or the commissioners. You and I talked about this when I had you on my radio show. Being heard and getting the result you want are often two different things. I mean, I would say in fairness to the mayor and commission and just to play devil's advocate, when we heard you, we just didn't agree with you. We voted another way. You understand that dynamic, I'm sure. I understand the dynamic, but for example, let me give you an example for the police oversight. The government did a survey. 89% or 90% of the people said they didn't want it. The police oversight board. Yes. There was a survey that was given by the government itself and about, I think it was more than 80% of the community said no. And yet we have a police oversight board. And yet we had a police oversight board. And your thoughts on that? Are you personally opposed to it or no? I was opposed to it because the results is you can form any group outside of in Athens and it still wouldn't have any kind of enforcement. It seemed more like optics to me than actual results that we're gonna be coming out of that. Let's talk about getting results. Crime and issue in Atlanta and Athens, Atlanta everywhere. Crime is an issue. What to do about it? Well, you know, one of the biggest things for me is police is important, you know, and we need to support the police. And I feel that having spoken to quite a few police officers trying to find out what the problems may be there, they don't feel supported. They feel that because there are some commissioners that are anti-police or there seems to be like when grants come up, they don't wanna support those grants or when the police require or ask the local government for safety equipment because they're putting their life in danger and it becomes an issue to even supply those kind of equipment. I know that some police officers told me they're buying their own life vests. So I thought, hmm, you know, police morale is big. So I think we would have to start with supporting the police as far as safety equipment, what they need to be better doing their job. Well, you heard the mayor, Mayor Kelly Gertz say earlier they are actually increasing, far from defunding, they're actually increasing the public safety budget. Yes, but by the fact that we do not have any body, coming in for those jobs, tells you that morale is a big issue as well, not just money. People want to be supported and be appreciated for their job because they do a better job. But if you're putting out raises and you're still not getting people to fill those jobs, there is a problem. We have to look at maybe the problem is not pay, right? What about the next chief? Your thoughts on what the next chief should be, what the next chief should be like? Well, you know, I spoke into chief's pool a couple of times. I liked his personality. He seemed honest when you asked him questions. He was very open about them. It did surprise me that he resigned so suddenly. I think some things that he mentioned to me, he said he wanted to work more with the youth, try to get youth involved in things so that way they don't get involved in bad situations. And he wanted to get more connected with the community. And I really liked that. I think anytime you're connected with the community, it's a great start. Whether you're a politician, whether you're a business, if you are connected to the community, that's a great start. A lot of questions and many of these questions submitted by our listening audience, questions that in general focus on the issue of affordable housing. We've touched on it here tonight. Your thoughts on affordable housing or maybe the lack of it in Athens? Well, you know, it's interesting. I will have to defend Ms. Pearl Hall. You know, when she said, what is affordable housing? I thought she got a really bad rap about that because it is true that affordable housing, there's nothing concrete about it. Are we talking about affordable housing for the homeless? There's certain initiatives that have been starting, like the tenant campment, right? $2.5 million, 22 months, $100,000 a month, more or less, for 50 tents, right? So we want to find out that kind of affordable housing. Is that the best solution for the homeless? That's one affordable housing. Now we could look at students may want affordable housing, right? So there's problems about gentrification and opening up other areas to student housing because they want affordable housing. Are we talking about those affordable housing? Things are not clear when the government talks about affordable housing. My question is, who's affordable housing? Because we also have workforce affordable housing. We have people that commute to come in to do jobs, you know, and they also would like affordable housing, you know, so we really need to define, as Ms. Pearl Hall said, who are we talking about? When we talk about the millions of dollars that are gonna be put into affordable housing, who gets priority over that? It's not clear. Finally, about a minute left here, Mara Zaniga, Nicaragua by way of New York, if I remember correctly. Yes. Your thoughts on, I know it's a huge question, you got like one minute to answer it. So the matter of race, gender and race as relates to our local politics and our local communities. Any challenges we need to overcome? Well, we always have challenges to overcome. You know, I went to a one-room school tour, right, that a church was holding. And while I was there, I was getting some history about how that school, you know, you had teachers there and the students were from different grades and I listened to some of the leaders that were speaking there and I thought to myself, wow, you know, the history that they're speaking about, the passion of how they overcame those challenges. I don't hear that, you know. You hear more of conflicts and problems than how people overcame those challenges and that's more inspiring to me because when I worked at the department of labor, when I worked in the home ownership with banks, it was always about motivation, what you could do rather than what conflicts you have. Mara Zanaga, candidate for mayor, thanks for coming out tonight. Thank you, Tim. Best of luck on the campaign trail. Thank you, everybody. Again, you are listening to our candidates forum on WGAU Athens. We are coming to you live from John Drew Auditorium in Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center. Fred Mormon, come on down. You're the next contestant. Running for mayor, the fifth of six candidates who are running for mayor and after we hear from the next two, we'll begin to converse with our candidates for Athens-Clarke County Commission. Dr. Fred Mormon, thanks for coming out this evening. Thank you for having me. You need this microphone, that'll help. Talk about why you decided to run for mayor. Well, I have had a very successful career in my life. I've got four college degrees. I received a master's in food science from the University of Georgia. Then I went to medical school in Augusta internship and residency and practiced dermatology for about 28 years. And I retired from that and I loved to travel. I've been to 38 countries and some of those countries, I just changed planes at the airport, but I was 14 hours in Istanbul, Turkey, and I'll never forget that. But I learned things from other countries and I've seen some things. Well, I've got about 32 years of experience in Athens, Georgia. Many people come here, go to the University of Georgia, I wanna live here, but they go back to Atlanta where their family is. And let's see, go ahead. You own a number of properties in Athens rental properties. I'm going to, and I know you've heard this, this is not going to come as a surprise to you. It's going to sound personal. It's not, it's me asking the question that's associated with the word that's associated with you. Far more frequently than I'm sure you would like. The allegation is, is that you are something of a slumlord. When that word is attached to your name, what do you, how do you respond to that? Well, may I ask what you contrived to be a slumlord? Well, I suppose the generally understood definition is someone who would own and rent underdeveloped and substandard housing for people of low means. That's absolutely not true. You might be talking to one out of a thousand people who had to be evicted because they didn't pay their rent. And now they get on the internet and spread bad stuff about anybody they can think of. But we, a lot of investment money goes to repair and build. At one point I owned 11 buildings downtown Athens. I was buying them when the stores were moving to the mall. And I thought it would be a great place to redevelop and have a living upstairs, which was not allowed prior to my activities. Well, if anyone would have hands-on experience with something we've discussed at length this evening, the question of affordable housing, I suppose it would be you, what do you say, what do you think when you hear this discussed behind the rail and in the community, the question of affordable housing or shortage of it in Athens? Well, affordable housing, you take the income and you take 30% of that. I believe I may be correct on this. If you take 30% of that and allot it for housing, they've got to have the other 70% to meet all other needs. Why don't they move in with their wife and take care of the kids that they produced. Maybe the kids could get a small-time job like a paper route that I started when I was 11 years old. It doesn't take one person's income to meet the needs of a family. But I just spent two months in Vietnam because I love to travel to other countries and my wife is from Vietnam and we went to visit her family. And when they have another member of the family, they build another room onto the house. They don't have nursing homes because family members take care of the older folks. They change bandages and feed them and get them to the emergency room if they need to have that aspect. Talking with Fred Mormon candidate for Mayor of Athens, the issue of crime has been addressed as well. Your thoughts on crime and more importantly, crime fighting in Athens? Well, I heard the other day that Marta in Atlanta is looking at a way to connect to Athens and we have a current mayor who's in favor of that. Many years ago, about 25 years ago, there was an old timer in Athens. He had a table downtown and he was against connecting that Marta to Athens because, and I have become against that too because do you want people who shouldn't be here taking a fast train to get here, commit a crime and take a fast train back? I wouldn't want that, but I don't know that it would necessarily mean that but that's one aspect to think about. So not importing crime when we have enough of our own to deal with. What do you want to see in the next police chief? Well, I think they get another year or two prior, after they have sought retirement and are receiving benefits from another city. I think they get 80% of their prior pay or a certain high percentage and health care. Then they come here and they can get a second job and double their salary, I guess. And I would seek a younger person, well-paid who's got the guts and the glory and proves himself here and stays here. We do have crime in Athens. I think a lot of it comes from Atlanta. This series of car break-ins, they caught some Atlanta guys on the way back to Atlanta after they had broken into about 15 cars. Fred Mormon, candidate for Mayor of Athens very quickly. How are you gonna spend the next, what, five weeks? What's your campaign gonna look like? Well, I want people to know that I am running. I'm a very successful man. My children, my two boys who are 28 and 27 said, Dad, don't do that. You don't need it. I'm at, but I feel, I've been in Athens as I've said 32 years. There's things here that I do not agree with. I don't agree with tearing 140-year-old statue down in downtown Athens. All right, Fred Mormon, we gotta leave it there out of time. Thanks so much, best of luck out there. Thanks for coming in this evening. Thank you. Final candidate for Mayor of Athens, making her way to the table, that would be Mykesha Ross, Mykesha Ross. First of all, the most important question I'm gonna ask this evening, am I pronouncing your name correctly, Mykesha? Yes, Mykesha. Mykesha Ross. Late of the district attorney's office, just for my own edification, you have just resigned your post there? I still currently. You still work there. Again, I need to know the answer to that. What would you say you've learned there that you would apply to being Mayor of Athens? Well, it wouldn't necessarily be what I learned there. I brought my value, my resources, and the things that I do in the community to the district attorney's office. When you have done community outreach for years, that's what my job is. My everyday job is to connect, collaborate, and partner with stakeholders to be able to build a relationship. Define that, that's a word I hear, stakeholder. Everybody in this room is a stakeholder. Every property taxpayer, every sales taxpayer is in some form or fashion a stakeholder. What do we mean by that? What do you mean by that? Well, what I mean by that is the people who hold authority. Not everybody in this room hold authority. They hold their own authority, but it's the people that sits and make decisions and policies. So with that being said, I am that person that connects them with the community concerns to address the needs in the DA office. Let's talk about that district attorney's office and the role in fighting crime in Athens, prosecuting accused wrongdoers. Is the relationship with the police department where it should be? Well, let me just be honest with you, Tim. Please. With the disclosure of my job, I don't want to get fired talking to y'all, but my job is community outreach. So when I say that, I am connecting people, but what the DA does is what the DA does. I have nothing to do with what the DA does. I bring the feedback in the community together to address the questions for the DA. Is there a theme, a consensus, an overarching theme in that feedback, or does it run the gamut? No, it's the concerns of what you just asked about the arrest, what's going on, the crime, how can we address it, what can we do to be able to stop the crime? So we have, I want to say three points, intervention, prevention, and reentry that we want to address. I'd quickly go through those. Well, be my guess. Intervention, what do you mean intervention? Intervention is what we want to do to be able to supply the resources for the people that are currently incarcerated or maybe join the system. Prevention is how can we prevent people from getting locked up? How can we prevent, mainly, my job is to address the youth, the juvenile. So how can I stop so much crime with the youth? What we need is the youth development funds to be able to address that. Okay, prevention, and you say working and focusing primarily with youth, the young people in the community, what's the big challenge there? And what's the effort like? What does it look like when you're trying to do this? Well, we're held back because we don't have those funds. If we have... How much funding are you talking about? And from where would it come? It would come from the local government if they stop putting a hold on the youth development funds. And how much are we talking about? Well, recently it was $7 million. One million was supposed to be able to start up some of the local grassroots organizations who's doing the work. But that funding now has extended due to addressing those concerns. So now we're hoping this summer that we'll be able to supply those local grassroots organizations who are addressing the youth to be able to stop crime because it's a lot of gang violence, a lot of shooting, a lot of dysfunctions. What do I get for $7 million that I don't have now? If you had the $7 million today, what would you do with it, Mykesha Ross, candidate from there? Well, I have a nonprofit called Youth Is Life. In that nonprofit, we address and prevent crime by helping youth build their own brand. And what I would do is propose for a resource hub field at least of 10 nonprofit organizations. In this building, I think it's on Commerce Boulevard. It used to be United Team Center. That building will provide at least 10 to 12 organizations to be in there. It has a recreation center. It has like a sports complex. So for me, if that's available here in Athens, why can't we use that building? The city can supply us with the building. But they have rejected the offer. A couple of other topics quickly. Your thoughts on the homeless encampment there off Barber Street. What do you think about what we're trying to do there? Well, first of all, I propose to the mayor commissioner and the city manager a different proposal, which was tiny homes. I feel like if you're gonna address a concern, moving them not just in the streets, you would wanna give them a step closer to housing and a sustainability plan. So I did propose pod homes and tiny homes. So that's what I would have done. Did you happen to run the cost on that? I'm just curious what that might have cost. That would have been close to 2.3 million. But you would have to have connected mental health to it. You would have had to connect different resources to it to be able to address these small families that's having homeless issues. I work with the homeless every day, but I just feel like it's more to just housing them in tents. What do you think about the overarching question of affordable housing or the shortage that some perceive in Athens? You've heard it discussed, your thoughts on it? Well, first of all, $1,400 per bed is not affordable. I am a single mother of two. I'm blessed to be able to stay where I'm staying. But if you only make $3,500 or $35,000 a year, how can you live off basic service? So people need basic needs, but we're not addressing that. So with affordable housing, it's none here in Athens. Now what's the government's role in providing it or creating it? You create small homes with your tiny homes with your models around the county. It's people on the outskirts of Athens who don't even have a homeless population, but we are the resource hood. We have those funds to provide. So why aren't we providing them? So $1,400 a bed is not affordable housing. Makisha Ross, candidate for mayor of Athens, one of six. You've just heard from them. Thank you so much. Best of luck on the campaign trail and we will talk to you next Tuesday morning on my radio show. Yes, thank you for having me. In studio next Tuesday morning, Makisha Ross rounding out our conversations with the incumbent and his five challengers. We will shift now and we'll go ahead and get Audrey Hughes. Where's Audrey Hughes? If Audrey Hughes can come join us on the stage. She will be the first of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine commission candidates. Audrey Hughes running in district one. Patrick Davenport, the incumbent. We'll hear from him momentarily. Audrey Hughes, thanks so much for joining us. Bit of biographical information first. Who are you? What do you do? Okay, hey, I'm Audrey Hughes and I teach middle school at Clark Middle School. This year I'm a gifted collaborator and part time math teacher. And why run for commission? Why run for commission? I think I can do a better job. My commissioner didn't listen to me, hasn't addressed my needs and I'm here to make a change. Let me, let me again play devil's advocate and Patrick Davenport can speak for himself. I don't know, maybe you can tell me what the issue or issues were, but I'm gonna be Patrick Davenport for a moment. I'm gonna say, yes, I heard you. I just didn't agree with whatever it is you wanted to do. I have what I think to be a better plan. Not being heard and not getting your way are often two different things as I'm sure as a mom you would certainly know. Absolutely, absolutely. In June of 2020, when the pandemic first hit, I lost, all right, so I'm a teacher and I was also coordinating the after school program and I always coordinated a summer school program as well. We lost, I lost those jobs and I had two children in college at the time and I had one with a medical procedure that was gonna have to take place in December. So I was scared. I was upset. I reached out to the board of education and because 21st century and summer school or all grant funded programs, there were no CARES Act funds for those. There was no rescue for that and I had a tuition bill due for my daughter as well, so when the property tax bill came, I flipped a gasket because I'm like, what am I gonna do? I'm single, I divorced in 2016 and it was not a pleasant divorce. Project SAFE was involved and I was a client there for four years and I'm still very connected to that organization. So I wrote my commissioner and asked for advice and help and I heard nothing from my commissioner. Let me ask the question, you're telling the story now, so let me go as far as you care to go and move towards the part where it's not about business. You can tell me, what did you want from your commissioner? What did I want from your local government? Right, from my local government. I will say that Mayor Gertz did reply and he did say they were looking into ways to help people like me in my situation and I do appreciate that and I heard from the District Four commissioner and I appreciate her. So at that moment, I'm like, my commissioner's not listening. Another incident came up in 2021 last summer in my neighborhood. I'm on the board for that community and we had several city officials out and we had some traffic issues and we had heard on TV and in the news that President Biden said infrastructure money is coming. I'm in a neighborhood in Southeast Clark County where we do not have sewer. We had some road issues in our neighborhood where the streets are too narrow for emergency vehicles to get through if people are parked in front of their homes. So I brought up the issue of, and a lot of my neighbors, we were all advocating for, hey, maybe this is our opportunity to get sewer in this neighborhood finally and we're only a mile down the street from Cedar Creek Water Reclamation Facility. It's just a mile. And there's sewer on the other side of Whit Davis Road. So we thought this is our opportunity to ask, so I asked. And I didn't hear anything for a couple of months. I followed up with an email finally and I did get an answer then, but this is the year later. And he said, we can't do it because of the topography of Falling Shoals. And I drive Westlake Drive every day. I'll go by Grand Island. There's steeper inclines in those areas and they have sewers. So that makes no sense to me. And then I got digging for documents. There's a document from 1990, 1997. It's all on ACC's website where it was promised when the city and county governments unified. And they were to have a plan in place within four years. And that plan is not in place. It's 32 years later and we still have areas of the county that do not have basic infrastructure. My neighborhood is one of those. Yeah, I've been here for a couple of those decades and it is a frequent conversation. Moving forward, as a commissioner, if you were to win this election in May, what would you do to work to solve the problems you've just discussed? Well, one, there's some basic transportation issues over on the East side. And I will say thank you, Patrick, for finally listening to me. And now he has adopted some of that on his little cards that he's going around the neighborhood with. And that is, I've asked that we can, if we could please have a bus stop at Barnett Shoals Elementary in Whit Davis, add them to the bus route. So parents and families can get there. So- Has that been done? It has not been done. And I didn't see it on the proposed T-spliced or if it is, it's not spelled out. I'd like to see it spelled out before I vote on it, May 24th. So I would like to see that added. And that's something I've been advocating for as a teacher in Clark County. We need a bus going to every single school. Parents that don't have transportation need access. And so what I would do is advocate for that. That's an easy fix. Just put more bus stops at each school, simple. Second, Southeast Clark Park, people would love to see a picnic table with a cover. We've got one, but it's not near the playground area. So if you're having a birthday party with your kids, you can't watch your kids and watch them play and have cake and ice cream and all that at the same time. So let's add something there so people can do that. And then third, I mean, there's a lot of things I would do, but this is a start. I would research more as to what do people want on the East side as far as those that are not serviced by the sewer? What do they want? Do they want sewer or do they want a tax break? Because we are incurring that increased cost for maintaining septic tanks. Audrey Hughes, candidate for the district, one seat on the Athens-Cart County Commission. About a minute left here. Talk about the next month for you. What's the campaign gonna be like? The next month is also the last month of school, so it is crazy busy. But on a positive note, my campaign's positive and I just wanna point that out that I'm a nonpartisan candidate. This is a nonpartisan race. My campaign manager is a Democrat. My campaign treasurer is a Republican and I love them both the same. Yeah, you wanna trust the Republicans with the money. Absolutely. That's a smart move. And I'm in the middle and I'm one of those that at work, anytime at work there's a conflict. I'm the great compromiser. I'm the one who can help people see both sides of an issue. And I think that's something I would bring to the commission. Audrey Hughes, candidate for post one district, one on the Athens-Cart County Commission. Best of luck. Thanks for your time this evening. Patrick Davenport, if you could come join us. Again, a reminder as Commissioner Davenport makes his way to our table here, you're listening to us from the John Drew Auditorium Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center. We're talking with now, we have just wrapped up conversations with the mayor and his five challengers, talking with candidates and in his case, an incumbent for a seat on the Athens-Cart County Commission. Grab the microphone and introduce yourself to the audience. And thanks for coming out this evening. Thank you. It's all or it shouldn't be. Thank you. Davenport current commissioner for district one. And I'd like to respond to some of the allegations. Please do. I'm just gonna sit here for seven minutes and you can, because she did, she laid out a lot of grievances, we'll call them and address them as you choose. Completely understand and I appreciate the feedback because that's what it takes to be a commissioner or elected official. You're gonna get criticized. You're gonna get criticism of me. It's a tough job. It is a pretty much a thankless job. But when you send an email chain to the mayor commission and all the non-commissioners, because I have a working job and there are times during the day that I'm not able to respond to the email quickly or effectively. So sometimes it may be later that night. So maybe another commissioner may be able to get to that email chain quicker than me. I do apologize. I do believe that poverty sucks and I don't want to live in it. So I continue to work. And also I own a small business where we only hire low income individuals. And unfortunately, sometimes when you hire low income individuals, they don't have the skills to manage to run a business. So I'm constantly helping them to understand what a cooperative is and how to run a business. That takes a lot. I don't want to say a lot of my time. It's very time consuming. But when it comes to serving in the community, I'm dedicated. I do the best that I can. I'm not perfect. I'm not trying to be perfect. And if I'm reelected, I guarantee you I won't be perfect. I'm a human being. I have a life and I do make mistakes. Of course, some of you guys have heard some of the mistakes I've made. I owned it and I apologize. And the same thing with the constituents that have disappointed over the past three and a half years, I do apologize. If I have not reached out to you, I have not responded to you. Blame it on my head and not my heart because I love each and every last one of you. And I will do the best that I can to continue to serve you. When it comes to sewage, sewage in Athens-Clarke County is very expensive. It literally requires a T-spots project to get sewers done. I'm not opposing sewer extension. I think it's a great idea because- Well, as she pointed out, Patrick Davenport, Commissioner Davenport, it was promised. It was as part of, and before your time, before mine here, but it was promised as part of the consolidation. It's a fair question, is it not, to ask that that promise at some point be delivered? So one of the other things that was promised was trash service as well. But the main thing is cost. So for us to extend the sewer lines, it's gonna cost a tremendous amount of money. That's why we're saying like a T-spots or a Spots project will be the best avenue to extend the sewer line. And just because the sewer line is close to you, doesn't mean that it's readily available to forward extension. Topography is an issue. You need pump stations. When it comes to construction of these sewer lines, when it comes to topography, become extraordinarily expensive to build. So not only do you have to balance the budget, you have to balance the needs of the community as well. And unfortunately, we're working, well unfortunately sometimes some of the top priority that these individuals have or these neighborhoods have may not resonate towards the American Commission. Talk about economic development in district one in particular, you and I were chatting on the radio some weeks ago. You and Commissioner Thornton kind of back and forth. Hey, you're getting all the good economic development stuff in your district. What about my district? Talk about efforts to bring jobs and then businesses to district one specifically. So district one is actually growing. We're revitalizing a lot of new projects that are coming into place right now. Unfortunately due to COVID, there was a pretty much a hold put in place for development. We've got a whole bunch of new restaurants. We got some new business services that are coming through. And yes, I am competing with Commissioner Thornton currently because Highway 72 has seen a lot of growth due to the growth of the population in Madison County. But I'm working with our economic development department and some of our local developers to bring more resources to East Aspen, specifically Leicesterton Road and the Gainesville Road area. But to stay tuned, I promise you, I think the public will be really pleased at what we'll see this summer and this fall when it comes to restaurant new developments that are actually announcing the developments in East Aspen. At the end of the day, what's the commission role in that? Or what should be the commission role in all that? I'm gonna build my business in Athens. I mean, I might need you to approve a reason. If not, why don't we wanna bother with the commission at all? Well, so if we wanna build a better community, we need the government to be involved because we wanna hear from the people and especially the many entrepreneurs that are out there. We wanna support them and make sure that their business is spanned. But the main thing is we wanna make it easier for businesses to develop, rolling back some of the restrictions that are in place. It has been suggested over the years that it's easier to do business in a neighboring county than it is in Athens. Perhaps you've heard that. I've heard that several times. Athens is unique because we wanna make sure that when we do develop in our community that we do it right. We are the local hub in this community. We wanna make sure that our storm water, we wanna make sure that sidewalks and things of that that may actually be restrictive to entrepreneurs who wanna do business in the community. But we wanna make sure we have those essentials in place when developments come in to develop. All right, about 90 seconds left, Commissioner Davenport. It's a huge question. Fight crime for us in 90 seconds. Okay, you cannot fight crime in 90 seconds. The biggest issue with crime is not that we need over-policing. We need social services. We need to really get out into our community and help the youth and some of these violent offenders to make sure they understand that like, we all live in a community together and there are other resources and avenues in our community that they can take advantage of to prevent crime. So one of the questions that you asked earlier today was a policing issue downtown. The real issue is that we have a crime problem. It's growing. But actually, crime is, excuse me, I'll take it back. Game violence is growing, but crime is actually decreasing in Aston Claw County. The best way is we gotta give the resources to these individuals who are committing these atrocities. What kind, what resources, what? Youth development. We could do community outreach. What are those, no, no, no, no, no, less than a minute now. What is youth development? What is community outreach? What is that? I mean, I know there's a phrase is, what do they mean? Okay, youth development. Given these kids and these individuals, resources in the community, giving them alternatives to staying at home or committing these atrocities, basketball, learning a trade skill, learning how to do something alternative other than doing bad things. Patrick Davenport, commissioner Davenport, best of luck out there. Thanks for coming by this evening. Y'all. Next up will be the two candidates signed for district three on the Athens-Clarke County Commission. Tiffany Taylor is the first of those to be followed by Asia Thomas. Tiffany Taylor making her way. Yeah, come on down. I'm mostly harmless. Thanks for coming out this evening. Grab the microphone. The first opportunity really to address this, there's a chance you might not be running, but for the redistricting matter, a seat that opens, shall we say, unexpectedly. Your thoughts on that whole process? A little closer. It was unfortunate that a few commissioners lost their seat, but it did open up opportunities for new faces with new visions and new opportunities, how we wanna see Athens go. So it was unfortunate for some, but it was a blessing for a few. All right, a bit about you quickly. Who are you, what do you do? Well, I'm Tiffany Taylor, born and raised here in Athens, Georgia. I graduated in 2006 from Cedar Shows, born and raised on the east side of Athens, which is now the district three. I've seen a lot of disparities my entire life. So as a parent living in district three, I decided that I would voice my opinion. Disparities, I described those, the economic, racial, what are you talking about? Racial, economic, educational, all the way around. District three is like a, I'm not gonna say district three. East Athens has been overlooked and underfunded and I'm 34. All I've known is underfundedness, all I've known is lack. And so as an adult and a parent, I'm stepping up to say, you will see us now. You will do the same things that you do across the board for East Athens. So you're not, you may be, but you're not now, you're not talking black versus white or Democrat, Republican. You're talking east versus west now. I'm not talking east versus west. I'm speaking government versus resident. It is the government's priority to make sure its residents has all the necessities that they need to prosper, to be successful. And if you see this in one part of town and you don't see this on the other, then what would you think, Tim? All right, what are you gonna do about it? You get elected, what are you gonna do? I'm gonna work hand in hand with the mayor and my fellow constituents. I said it wrong, but. You mean commissioners perhaps, yeah. Commissioners, yes. Work with them to put our heads together and come to a solution on how do we better East Athens? What would a solution look like? I mean, you say make East Athens better. What at the end of the day, what does that mean? Livable wages. We need livable wages to afford our houses, to be at home with our children. We need funding within our youth programs so that the children who are left at home have something to do for our teenagers. We need trade programs so that it is more appealing to be an entrepreneur than a gang member. You know, I hear that Tiffany Taylor candidate from here. All right, I'm sorry for commission. I don't, are you ever going to be able to, okay, I'm gonna get a little ahead of myself. Are you, there you go. Speak it into existence. Are you ever, however well-intentioned, are you ever going to be able to outspend the gangs? Aren't the gangs always whatever you do by way of some youth job. Isn't the gangbanger going to, by definition, be able to pay more? Yeah, yes. The gangbanger may seem more appealing with making money and a brotherhood, but what teens fail to realize that that glamorous life, it carries so much consequences. 25 to life, prison time, death, paraplegia, you know, being shot. It carries so much weight. So what I plan to do as commission is to make being successful glamorous, to make being a high school graduate glamorous. We have to give them alternatives than what they see. What our teens see when they walk out their house is gangs. What they see is violence. What they see are package stores, which are spirits across town. But in my town, on my side of town, is liquor stores. So that's what they see. Isn't though at base, is this not at least in part a law enforcement issue, a police issue? Police is down building, Tim. No, I'm talking about the crime and the preventing of it. You know how these kids are out there seeing crime, they're introduced to crime at a very young age of what, let me ask the question this way, what's the role for the police to play in all this if there's one? It's to be a community advocate, because our youth as well as the adults don't trust the police officer. Because in my neighborhood, when the police pull up on you, they pull up on you with aggression. They don't pull up to you asking, how may I assist you? Or how may I serve you? Like the old says to protect or serve. That's not what we receive in East Athens, nor parts of Winneville. Again, compare and contrast that with other parts of town. Do you think it's better than other parts of town? Absolutely. I've been here for 34 years, Tim. I've been walking downtown and had someone scream out at me, this is not the ghetto. And I was born and raised here. So if you want to speak about racism, it is very real in Athens. And finally, about a minute left here, a minute and a half, what's the commission role in fighting that? Well, you can't fight it if it's always brought in every four years. We just recycle it. Unpack that for me. What do you mean by that? Our UGA students and the things that they bring with them is entitlement. And the residents that look like me, that work every day, are beneath that entitlement. So with entitlement comes the audacity to speak. And so they just let it fly. And I'm a witness of it. Okay, and fair enough, I'm not disputing that that's happening at all. I'm just questioning what there is to do about it, especially what there might be to do about it from the commission seat. We just have to fight poverty. That's all. There's really nothing that commission can do to fight the racism here. Because Athens was built on it. It's gonna be here way after we leave, Tim. All right, we will leave it there. Tiffany Thomas, candidate for the District 3C. Taylor, Tim Taylor. Sorry, Tiffany Taylor. My apologies, Tiffany Taylor, correct me if I'm wrong, thank you so much. Best of luck. Asia Thomas, Asia Thomas is our next candidate. Get that right. Asia Thomas, thanks for joining us. You should know the drill by now. Grab that microphone and you and I will chat for a minute. Let's talk about some of what you just heard there. She makes it sound pretty dire. How bad is it, for lack of a better way to ask the question? Well, first I wanna say thank you, Tim, for having me and thank you all for coming out. And so how bad is it to have what was the question? She's referencing racism. She's referencing economic disparity, specifically as relates to the district in question here, District 3. The district you would represent were you to win this election. Do you agree with her assessment? I think that we have to have unity within our community. There is no community without unity. Inside of the word community is unity. And so a lot of times we will continue to hulk on these things that are divisive instead of figuring out how to build bridges instead of building walls. And I think in order to really see change in our community is gonna take everybody, every race, every color, every ethnicity to come together and really begin to address these issues that we're facing on the East Side. I do believe that the East Side is oftentimes a forgotten child. I do think that there is a lack of resources that are getting funneled on that side of town, even with talking to some of the business owners over there who don't know about things that are coming forth in our government. So how do we begin to funnel that information because people can't act on what they do not know? So if there are resources, now opportunities that are given, how can we get this communication to the people that need it and will benefit from it the most? Again, Asia Thomas candidate for district three on the Athens-Clarke County Commission. Is it simply in your estimation? And I've never been a commissioner. I don't know what goes on back there. I know what I see on Tuesday nights. Is it simply a matter, their X amount of dollars I want as many of them from my district as I can get? Is it simply that, a money grab from my district as opposed to somebody else's? Sometimes it feels like whoever makes the loudest noise is the one that gets what's needed, right Tim? Whoever shows up and makes the loudest noise that this is what I want and they come in numbers. It's a lot of pressure behind that from them to make a decision. But I believe that my job as a commissioner is to advocate and to bring these things to the table to be able to vote on it. I think a lot of times what people fail to realize is that commissioners do not make final decisions, right? I create a proposal, I bring that to the table and then I have to get six or seven other commissioners to agree with what I've brought to the table in order to see that passed. Let's talk about some of these specific issues that have been addressed this evening. Law enforcement, police funding, there are those on the commission to this day who want to reduce it. You've heard the mayor say when his budget comes out tomorrow night there's gonna be more money for public safety. Where are you on that? What should we do by way of incentivizing police to come here? What do we even want? Yeah, I definitely think that there's a place for law enforcement. I think that there's a place for us to be able to support our law enforcement. I've even spoken with people in the community. And one thing that I really wanna know why don't we have lateral transfer? That's been something that has been brought up several times to me about why do we not allow police officers to transfer laterally. I see them doing it in Oconee County. Maybe that is a way for us to kind of approach this issue of the lack of law enforcement we see and we can actually get people that are experienced that have kind of been doing the job and allowed them to come in and help as well. But I do believe that there's a place of support. I think what we've seen that brings about a lot of fear is a lot of times we've seen where police officers have abused their authority in certain areas. And so I can understand it in some areas. So I think that there has to be a balance between our support of law enforcement but also making sure that law enforcement has the right tools they need to be able to address certain issues that may be different from community to community. Here's the, and again, I'm talking with Asia Thomas, candidate for District Three on the Athens Clark County Commission. When I call the police because somebody's broken into my house or whatever, I want the crime solved. I want the criminal caught. I want to be made whole as much as I can be. And I don't want to be placed in danger. I don't think that's unique to me as a white person. In fact, I know it isn't. People who live in communities of color in Athens, I would assume have and I know have those same aspirations. And yet we're told that the police, we just heard, they come into my community, they come in guns blazing at all hostile. Is that your assessment of it? I believe just like you said, when I call the police and I have an issue, I want those same things happened as well. I cannot discredit the fact that there are people that have different perspectives of different people, right? You know, and how they view different ethnicities in different areas. Them coming into your neighborhood, they may feel a lot more safer than them coming in on the east side. So they may have their guards up a little bit more. I don't know what I'm going to expect here, right? And so that may fuel the aggression when coming into certain areas. But again, I can't speak on how that's done, but I know that this has been, you know, people have seen that. And so that builds walls. And I think that through community engagement, going back to creating those relationships between law enforcement and community will help to build that trust and allow people to not see law enforcement as a threat, but as those that are there to help them to serve. Unfair question, but I'll ask it anyway. If it's hypothetical, which is why it's unfair, you weren't. But if you had been a commissioner at the time of the vote on the homeless encampment, how would you have voted? I've been asked that several times. And I think from my perspective, I would have wanted to know what all was going into the vote. I would want to see the proposal. You know, I had a lot of questions as well when I got to go and view the encampment. You know, I wanted to know if this is the first step, what is the second step, and what is the next step? One of the biggest things, and I commend Charles Hardy for everything that he's doing over there, because I think they worked very hard, was that a lot of people were getting sexual abuse. A lot of crimes were happening. There was not a safe place for these people. And this encampment has provided that for them. And it's also helping them to kind of get to the next. So I can't necessarily say exactly what I would have had to, you know, evaluate the entire budget and everything that was going into it prior to, but I think that because it is here now, we have to figure out what we're gonna do to, you know, continue to help those that are experiencing homelessness. Less than a minute here, so quickly, Asia Thomas. Just a handful, if you will, of life experiences that you would bring to bear as a commissioner. I think for me, I have a non-proper called United Community Outreach that worked on mentorship for young men. And so I think a lot of what we're seeing in our community is a root of trauma. A lot of people are dealing with different areas of trauma and abuse that have led to drug abuse and violence. And so I think in order for us to really attack some of the issues, we have to really begin to get to the root of these issues and begin to address them there. And so I think that my experience has been with building a community, working in these areas and helping people to overcome trauma and different things in their lives so that they can live successful and be productive in our community. Asia Thomas, Tiffany Taylor, the two candidates in district three. Best of luck, thanks for coming out this evening. All right. Next up, we will shift and turn to district five, Dexter Fisher. Slides in, Dexter Fisher. Thanks for coming out this evening. Thank you, Taylor. Start the same place that I think we addressed earlier. You're running for a seat that opened because the Republicans in the legislature redrew the boundaries and renumbered the districts more precisely. Your thoughts on that? So my thoughts on that, Tim, was based on pretty much, I always believe in local control. And unfortunately, that didn't happen. However, like Miss Thomson talked about and other candidates have talked about, there's an opportunity though, opportunity for other people to serve, opportunity to get new ideas and new faces in the commission and to move this community forward. You heard a lot of folks talking about issues in education, even though we have candidates from mayor and county commission as opposed to school board, you come from sometime in the Clark County School District. What do you think? Talk about for a moment, we heard a phrase a moment ago, bridges versus walls. Which do we have more of, the relationship between Athens Clark County Government and the Clark County School System? I think that relationship is getting better. I think there's been some talk with the Clark County government and also with the local school district. One of the things we've been talking about is youth development. That's been a big thing. I'm here tonight. And that's my number one priority as a commission is to work with our young folks. I've been an educator for over 34 years. Started at UGA, spent 32 years there, spent the last three years as a Clark County K-12. So I've seen what goes on in our schools and what's impacting our young people right now. Well, let's talk about that though because I continue to ask and I'm getting a little frustrated. So maybe you can give me a good solid answer here. What is the commission role in developing youth? And we're gonna work on a budget tomorrow night that deals with water and sewer and police and those things in terms of developing youth. Define the term and tell me what the commission role is in doing it. Well, one thing in the commission role, they got leisure services. They got parks. They got auditoriums. They got buildings that serve youth. So that's one of the things that they do. It's like that school district. We serve young people. Now, one thing we need to do as a community is make sure that we help those young people get to where they need to be. Now, I don't think we've done a very good job of that. I think with our partnership with the local government, with school district, youth and carers fund, combine those carers funds to start developing programming that will help our youth. We're talking about the gang issue. As you know, gang issues are very prevalent in our schools right now, unfortunately. We gotta come up with a better plan than the gangs than what we've been doing as a local community. Well, again, good luck. We're gonna play basketball and we're gonna give kids some youth jobs I'm not talking about basketball. Okay, what are you talking about? I'm talking about real programming. All right, let's go. For example, on the other young man now in life, he does a program called Chess and Community. He does stand programming. Lynn Kinsey has a program that deals with sewing. Teaching young girls how to sew. On Rick Dunn has a program that produced radio shows. Got young people working behind the scenes, being on the mic, learning how to produce shows. So those are the type of things I'm talking about. I'm not talking about shooting no basketball. One of the things that I do when I go visit young people, I ask them two questions. Tell me what you wanna do with the rest of your life. And one thing they can't answer, it can't be sports and it can't be entertainment. It's gotta be something else. So we got, as a community, we got often better programming. And none of them do any of them. Yeah, I wanna be in this gang for the rest of my life. It's gonna be a short life, probably. Oh, and so, but no, they don't talk about gangs. Now I think we need to do enough of that. Get people in this community, go visit our schools, bring in different people with different backgrounds and talk about different skills, because we don't do that enough. Dexter Fisher, candidate for District 5 on the Athens Park County Commission. What's the police department's role in all this? What should it be? Well, first of all, police is the servant of the tech. We talked about that. One of my responsibilities is the police department reports to me and our school system. And one of the things is that we have a great relationship with the Athens Park County police and our resource officers in our police department. If they ain't goes on in the school, our chief or our officer will report back to the community and say, hey, we have an incident in our schools. They'll reach out to the police department and say, hey, we maybe need to take a look at that. Same thing, if something happened in the community and those community involved kids, we're gonna know about it. So when they come to school the next day, we're gonna know how to deal with it and be ready and prepare to take care of that situation. The question has been raised behind the rail of defunding to some extent in some form or fashion the police department. Did they have enough resources? Do we need more? First of all, I would never defund our police department. My son-in-law is police officer, so I would never defund the police department. Secondly now, there are resources available. They probably now know one thing that we can do to attract officers is help them found housing to move into these communities. If the new police chief, one thing I'm gonna ask that individual is when you recruit officers, you recruit officers who's gonna look like their community. If they're gonna be on the east side, they're gonna be on the west side, it needs to look like their community. Let's call that what it is. You're saying black communities, preponderantly black communities should be patrolled by black police officers. That's possible, I mean, they got a lot in common. Why wouldn't it be? Again, Dexter Fisher, candidate for a seat on the Athens-Clarke County Commission. You mentioned housing, finding housing for police officers as they move in from other communities. The question of affordable housing has been raised this evening. Your thoughts on that? Well, I just read an article about affordable housing in the United States. There are four million homes in the scarce right now that we can't find in this country. We're the smallest county in the state and we're still trying to find affordable housing. And then I'm like, what Ms. Hoffman, what is affordable housing? I look at affordable housing as a family that has a house. Now the apartment has a house where kids can have their own bedroom. Statistics have shown, if a kid lives in their own house, they do better in school, they have better grades. So affordable housing looks different to everybody. We gotta come up with solutions. Maybe you work with developers and get them incentives to build $150,000 home or $2,000 home. Yes, they may lose money, but what kind of incentives do we do or give them to help them build those type of homes? Well, that's been addressed in this inclusionary zoning to the extent that you understand it. Do you support it? I don't understand it right now. I need to read it and figure out what it's gonna impact. All right, again, Dexter Fisher, candidate one of three for the District Five seat on the Athens-Clarke County Commission. We've got 30 seconds. Tell us how you're gonna spend the next month. We've been knocking on doors. We're hustling. We grindin' and gonna continue to grind. One thing I like about this campaign is meeting different people in our community. I love knocking on doors. I'm a people person. I love knocking on doors. So we're gonna continue to do that. I got two major events come up in the home of Hill subdivision and also in Hampton Park this weekend where they're hosting me. We're gonna have a good time. We'll get people out to vote and we're gonna support Dexter Fisher for the Commission of District Five. Dexter Fisher, best of luck out there. Thanks for coming out this evening. Thank you. Jared Bailey up next. Former commissioner hopes to return to the Athens-Clarke County Commission. Jared Bailey, grab the microphone and we will chat for a few minutes as soon as I do what I'm supposed to do here in terms of giving you your seven minutes. Let's pick it up where he left off. Dexter Fisher there. In talking about affordable housing, you would know the forum. I don't, but you were quoted in maybe an interview or some other forum saying you're not sure government, local government has a role to play in affordable housing, elaborate on that. Well, we do. The question was posed without the ability to go into more detail. It was posed as if we, the local government should actually be building housing, affordable housing and that is definitely not our role. But our role is to work with the organizations that try to provide affordable housing. For example, the Housing Authority, Athens Land Trust, groups that try to find housing for individuals that are having issues with, with having disability and not being able to find a place, having needs that are not easily met. But in bigger sense, we, the local government, need to be doing more and better economic development so that people can afford housing. Housing has definitely gone up in this community. It's, there's no doubt. My house is worth incredibly more than I paid for it and it's not a very big house. And by the way, that's gonna be reflected in your property tax bill and in mine as well. Yes it is. And by the way, in the property tax bills of people who rent, this affects them as well. What's, if anything, to be done about that from behind the rail and you've been behind the rail? Well, I think I wanna finish though on the aspect of the economic development aspect. What we need, of course, is people who make enough money, make a living wage so they can afford the housing that's out there. We do have a shortage, price has gone up, it's making it more difficult, even for people who have jobs that pay what was considered a living wage before. But we as a community need to be working to get more jobs here and work with the organizations that do job training, work with all the organizations out there that provide services to people in need to get them into more secure situations. But to me, it's really mostly as a government's responsibility, we budget money to work with organizations that do work in the field of affordable housing. And we give that money to those organizations. But bigger picture, we need to be attracting businesses here and working with the organizations that provide the job training so that people can have jobs that pay enough for them to afford housing. Did those kind of things happen? I mentioned your previous tenure on the Athens-Cart County Commission, Jared Bailey. Did those kind of things happen when you were behind the rail the first time? And if so, what did they look like? Absolutely. What was the results you gave? Well, let me first say that before I was a commissioner, I worked for the Athens area, well, Athens-Cart County Economic Development Foundation. And I've had professional training as an economic development specialist. And the commission actually does, we have an economic development department and they try to recruit businesses. Chamber of Commerce works with that as well, trying to recruit businesses, trying to help entrepreneurs. And by the way, I'm an entrepreneur too. So I've got some background in that. There are situations when there are incentives offered to companies to move here by our local government. And those things are voted on by the commission, but they're done in closed session because we don't always want to reveal the terms. Because you're in competition with other communities exactly, exactly. And it's perfectly legal, but we voted on several things, like the caterpillar plant moving here that was one of the big things we did. There were plenty of others over the eight years that I was commissioner. So yes, I have sat behind the rail and I have had input on economic development and that's what we need to continue to do. Quality jobs here. What do you make of this whole argument that we don't stack up with Oconi County and they're beating the brakes office, there's so much less regulation, so much more business friendly. You've heard that for years I have too, so is everybody in this room. Well, I don't think that's the case. I mean, there are plenty of businesses that move out there that will eventually move back here. It's kind of a cycle, the best and newest and moving back and forth. But I think we have a great community here. I think that we have built a city that's attractive to people and to businesses and yes, our regulations, our building codes and some of our regulations are a little stricter than some other communities but it's because we want to keep the quality of life here. We want to keep the environment as clean as we can. And I guess the market answers this. Are they overly burdensome? Are they onerous? I don't think so. We've addressed that issue when I worked, when economic development before, I've worked with the chamber before and I've heard that argument over and over and I think that we have tried to make things as welcoming as we can without selling the farm. Less than a minute left. Why do you want to give away the farm? Why do you want to do this again? Less than a minute. Okay, well, I've always felt that public service is one of the highest callings and I did it before and of the three candidates and for my district, I'm the only one who has any experience at it, eight years and it's difficult. You need the right people in there. You don't need somebody who's just gonna say a bunch of catchphrases or agree with everybody or go with the most current fad. You need somebody who's gonna really listen to people and try to make the best decisions for everyone in the community and it is difficult. It is a thankless job, but somebody's gotta do it and you gotta have the right people in there and that's why I'm doing it because I feel like I'm the right person for it. Jared Bailey, former and perhaps future commissioner. Jared Bailey, thanks for coming out this evening. Finally in district five, finally in district five, another candidate of three, Dexter Fisher, Jared Bailey from whom we've just heard. Matt Pulver joining us on WGAU Athens. And I grabbed the microphone and off we go and we'll start as we have with some of these other candidates the fact that you're in this race at all, elegant least in part to the fact that the republicans in the local legislative delegation did what they did, not to relitigate, but just to give me your thoughts on that. Yeah, in 2018, Athens voted for a clear mandate for progressive action. We voted in the most progressive mayor and commission we've ever had and republicans responded with an attack on our democracy. And that's precisely why I'm running, yes. What would you do about it? Do about what? Well, the fact that these republicans in this legislative delegation, you would say you just had an attack on democracy, we can't let that slide, what are you gonna do? Well, I think going forward, what we need to do, and this is why I'm running, is to make sure that we put in place a commission that is as progressive as the one that was attacked. So that's why you would vote for Matt Pulver, right? I'm gonna be the one who keeps us on a progressive path toward living wages, toward rethinking economic development so that all communities are valued, all communities benefit, all labor is valued. Define, I'm packed some of that for me. Those are catch phrases. Somebody use that phrase a moment ago. Define that for me. I did all communities this, that, what do you mean? In the Athens context, that mostly means the black community. I mean, anybody who's been here for any length of time, right, knows that there's a staggering disparity between wealth, power, and everything between the white and black community. I mean, that's, I hope I'm not telling anybody anything. I'm curious because progressives have had a very prominent voice in local affairs for as long as I have been here, and it doesn't seem from your perspective that the situation's gotten much better. Why would we depend on progressives to then make it better moving forward? Well, we have made a lot of progress. We have made a lot of progress. Several years ago, the poverty rate was 38%. We've gotten that down to just below 25%. You know, there are progressive solutions. You know, conservatism is what gave us racism and economic inequality. We don't, we don't, we don't, we don't, we don't, we don't, we don't, we don't fix the errors of conservatism with more conservatism. We do it with progressivism. That's what we do in Athens. All right, give us, give us, all right, down to the stop center. Yeah, yeah. Give us, give us some specifics. Give us some specifics. Specifics how? No, you're gonna, you're gonna deal with racism. You gotta, I'll give you three minutes to deal with racism. Fix racism in three minutes. Yes, exactly, yes. Matt, Paul. Well, like, like some candidates have said, part of it is, is addressing poverty and truly, truly tackling poverty, right? Like not nibbling at the edges, like tackling it head-on. You know, it said that. With what? With what? With higher wages, with more money in people's pockets. Paid for by whom? Employers, the county, the university. When I started working with Economic Justice Coalition some 10, 15 years ago, wages and salaries for the lowest paid people on campus was $12,900. Okay. I'm sorry, how long ago was this? That was, that was 15, probably 17 years ago, maybe something like that. We fought and fought and fought and pushed them and now the opening salary is 27, over $27,000, right? Has probably something to do with the fact that poverty has come down from 38% to 25% as if by magic, they have more money in their pockets and they're not in poverty. That's the name of the game. Extend that to the private sector. It's one thing for the government to do this. It's something else altogether for the private sector to do it. Sure. You know, one thing I'd like to do is, lobby the legislature to allow us to return local control to Athens and so that we can form what are called like community benefit agreements where we are able to say, hey, if you're gonna come in here, if we can mandate the number of trees you have in your parking lot, we also should be able to talk about wages, right? Well, that is discussed at the state and federal level. Should it be discussed at the local level as well? Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, if we're gonna hand a caterpillar $33 million in tax abatements and other incentives, what are we, you know, I think we should be able to talk about wages, right? Those are, if you're talking about caterpillar jobs, those are generally regarded as good-paying jobs, are they not? Yes, they are good. But where we should have been at the table, we should be at the table. If we're gonna give you $33 million, we need to be talking about wages, right? So I'm sorry, I'm not arguing, that's not my nature. I'm just trying to understand. I'm passionate about this. No, I'm trying to understand. If you're saying caterpillar jobs are good-paying jobs, what problem are you trying to solve? Well, you know, let's leave caterpillar. Let's talk about any big employer that comes in. We should be able to do what's called a community benefits agreement, right? Where you come in, we sit at the table, and we say, what can you do for us wage-wise? Because we've had a poverty problem in this city, in this county, for forever. And it has to stop. Everything is downstream from our poverty problem. We've been talking about crime. How hard do you push though? Okay, well, we'll discuss this in some other town. You end up losing the business. Well, we have the largest economic engine in Northeast Georgia, right? We have a university, right? 40,000 students. The university ain't on wheels. It ain't going nowhere, right? That is gonna keep business around. You know, all this talk about business is going to Oconee. Nah, they ain't going to Oconee like that. Not when you have 40,000 students that are gonna be supplying the most robust economic engine, this side of Atlanta. Matt Pulver, candidate for the District Five seat on the Athens-Clarke County Commission, give you just a parting shot to shoot back in the audience if you want to. Just to defend for a moment. I'll give you a full minute here and don't beat up on the candidate. That's my job. Give me a defense. I welcome your hatred. A full-throated defense of progressivism, as you see it. I'll give you a minute. A full-throated defense of progressivism. Progressivism has never been tried in Athens. Not really. I mean, this is a town that was built on black labor. Still is. This is a town that maintains basically a permanent underclass of people who work all the crappy jobs to make the university run. We've never experimented with progressivism. We just started. And we've had success, y'all. There's no way we're gonna get affordable housing through conservative means. There's just not, because it would have worked. There's no way we're gonna fix crime through conservative means. We've run Reagan's warrant. One word answer, yes or no? Defund police. Not defund police. No, allocate resources. Gotta end it there. Matthew Pulver out there on the campaign trail, running in district five. Thanks for coming out this evening. Finally, finally, I say finally, are you gonna speak? No, I know Vita Thornton is gonna speak. Let's jump in with district seven candidates. First up, John Culpepper. John Culpepper, making his way to our table this evening. John Culpepper, slide on in. Welcome, thanks for coming out tonight. Let me just jump right into where we left off there. I gather you're going to find some area of disagreement with what you heard as a progressive vision for Athens. You would, I think, unapologetically describe yourself as more conservative than less. Talk about your political philosophy and what you do behind the rail. Well, Tim, first of all, thanks for the chamber and thank you for everybody for being here. One of the things about local politics is they're nonpartisan. And I don't want to bring national issues locally. What I want to do is work on workforce development, talking about giving people good paying jobs. Let's give them the skills to have those jobs versus just giving it to them. Because if you just give them the money, then the manufacturers, whoever, they're going to have to raise their prices to pay to offset the cost of these higher wages. We're seeing that right now with inflation. So let's give them the tools to build workforce development and build their skills to where they can earn a higher wage. I agree 100%. I think workforce development is the key to everything we've been talking about today. Poverty will start coming down if we work on that. But we've got to work with our kids. We've got to invest in our children. They're our future. And we need to start third and fourth grade with literacy. And then with mentor programs, enhanced mentor programs after school programs and community centers. We had those, when the schools were closed for a year and a half, those programs were closed. We saw an uptick in crime because we didn't have, some of the children did not have the opportunity to get a positive, somebody with a positive influence on their life at home, they did not have that. And that's where they were getting was these programs. So we've got to invest in those. We start with there, then when we get to high school, people have gotten mad at me saying, you know, you're talking about school board issues and you don't have anything to do with the school board. I'm in the employment business. I own a company called Express Employment Professionals. And we employ about 900 people each week in the surrounding area. I've got four offices, Athens, Brasiltown, Covington and Lawrenceville. I see on a day to day basis, employers are struggling for qualified workers. What we need to do is work, that in Jackson County, they have a thing called the Empower College and Career Academy. It's an educational partnership with the school district and the local businesses. But haven't we done some of that with, and specifically in conjunction with Athens Tech, aren't there those kinds of arrangements local? With Athens Tech, I'm talking about high school. Okay. But that involves high school students. Correct. But we need to enhance that. In Jackson County, the local businesses and the local industries have provided funding. They provided equipment. And so in theory, when these children graduate from high school, if they do not want to go to a technical school or to a secondary education, they have a job at one of the local industries because the industries had to say so in creating that curriculum. That, when we have people that are going to work right out of high school with good paying jobs, that will help and lower our poverty. What do you do about crime, John Culpeper? Police, you've heard police morale discuss, the lack of police morale. Some have said, what do you do about crime and crime fighting? The people who we employ to fight the crime in our community. First of all, we need to support our police officers. We've got 47 open positions as of this morning at the police department. We've lost Chief Sprule and we've also lost a lot of tenured staff. So that's a lot of experience that we're losing. We've got to be able to recruit good officers. We've also to be able to play them well, then provide them the resources and the training they need and the local government has got to support them. We're having trouble recruiting qualified people right now because of the stigma about the local government not supporting the police force. Well, you heard the mayor say earlier the increasing starting pay for some of these officers to $47,000. You tell me how competitive that is with some of our surrounding communities. It seems to be competitive with at least some of the smaller rural counties. Now you get over to Metro Atlanta, different animal, but that is a- Pay is not everything though. It's the culture and how they're treated and how they're respected in the community and how they're supported by the local officials. Pay is one thing, but there's a lot more to go that would just pay them. What are the property taxes? You mentioned John Culpepper, inflation and price values, home price values going through the roof. We're all going to see that reflected on an X batch of property tax bills. Would you as a commissioner be willing to consider freezing, eliminating property taxes for senior citizens? Absolutely. So affordable housing, we were talking about that earlier, affordable housing can also be people that are in their homes that can't afford to stay there because of the rising property taxes. We need to look at rolling back our millage rate to offset the increase in the property values, also possibly freezing property values for low income families or seniors over 65. Your father, your late father, I knew quite well in his passion for linking Athens and Atlanta with some form of rail. We heard that criticized, talk of that criticized earlier in the evening. Where would you be on that? And is that even worth considering at this point? I mean, as much as I'd love to see it because it was my dad's passion and I'd love to see his legacy continued. I don't think that's the top thing we need to worry about right now. We got to worry about a crime. We're about to get our streets straightened out. And in terms of that, what do you want to see in the next police chief? Leader, we had a great leader in Chief Sprule and we need a leader who's going to connect with the community and be involved in the community. Chief Sprule was wonderful. I hate that we lost him. Somebody very similar to him would be great. We heard someone say earlier, and this will be the last question for you. Someone say earlier, well, we need to put that in. They said it. We need to put black officers in black neighborhoods and white officers in white neighborhoods. That type of law enforcement segregation, is that a good thing? I don't know. I mean, we want people to connect with the community so you want somebody that's going to be able to connect with that community. But that doesn't necessarily have to be race. I mean, it has to be somebody that can speak to those people and connect with them. All right, John Culpepper, candidate in district seven, one of two. Thanks for coming out this evening. Thank you, Tim. Final candidate in district seven, Alan Jones makes his way up here to join us. Alan Jones, thanks for coming out this evening. Thank you for having me, Tim. I get my timer reset and off we go. Talk about, and again, we've posed this question to others in your circumstance who jumped into this race as a seat opens that we didn't think was going to open until we got what we got with redistricting. Your thoughts on that? Well, everything that was done was done legally, but that doesn't mean that it was particularly right. They redistricted three people out of their seats because they didn't like that particular brand of politics. They made these new districts, which if you look at them, there are clear people that they chose to represent those districts. And now they have also really gotten together with a lot of people from Atlanta to fund those people that have that kind of more conservative mindset. And you would describe yourself politically leaning more toward the progressive end of the spectrum? I would say that I am fairly fiscally conservative but socially liberal and I do vote Democrat. Fair enough. What does that mean when you get behind the rail? How would that manifest itself in some of the various decisions you'd be asked to make? It's not particularly the biggest thing. It is a nonpartisan race, but things like, we've heard talk about living wages, things like that that I would stand for. I wouldn't call myself a far end of either extreme. I'd like more information on what? Well, sure, and get into specifics, a fair way to answer that. Again, Alan Jones candidate for a seat on the Athens-Clarke County Commission District Center. I think you and I talked about this on our radio show. You hear all this and we've talked about a lot of those big issues, police protection and defunding police and workforce development. And a lot of the phone calls and anybody who's served on the commission can tell you this, a lot of the phone calls have to do with garbage that didn't get picked up or a pothole in the street. How do you deal as a commissioner, as a commission candidate, with just those day-to-day quality of life issues? I know you've worked with folks on the Timothy Corridor about some of these things in particular. Yeah, well, yes, I did form a group, an advocacy group for the Timothy Corridor because I think it's not so much when we talk about the splosth and the T-splosth, not funding a specific area. I think part of it is the fact that we weren't a unified government for a long time. So a lot of the back when Athens was just the city, a lot of the resources went to that area. So now a lot of the more suburban areas that are on the fringes haven't gotten as much. Timothy is one of those areas we saw that the road itself is rather dangerous. So what we did is I started Timothy forward. We got the neighborhoods together. We had about 90 people at our first meeting and we just had a listening session. What do people want? We had Chief Sprule there. We had the Director of Transportation and Public Works. We had our commissioner. I said we had about 90 people there to listen to what they wanted. We determined some of the things that they wanted and now I've been working on those for a number of years and we've got about $8 million that should be coming into the corridor that is doing everything from traffic calming to advanced crosswalks with flashers to a gateway treatment at the entrance to the area and most importantly, sidewalks especially to the poorer areas of Timothy Road that don't have them and hopefully it's actually gonna be a multi-use path if the money holds out. Again, Alan Jones candidate for District 7 on the Athens-Clarke County Commission, the matter of law enforcement and the next police chief. I think somebody said four police chiefs now in eight years. Your thoughts on what do you want the next police chief to be and do? Well, I think the next police chief I would hope would have a little stronger focus on de-escalation but in general I just think we need somebody that we can get to be here a long time and I think that's with every police officer we have and we've talked about raising wages but longevity bonuses for our officers to make sure they wanna stay here possibly even lowering the number of years they need to retire so that we don't see after we've spent all this money and time training our officers that they decide after 10 years of having to deal with students vomiting in their cars that they decide to move to Peach Tree City. Yeah, again, Alan Jones candidate for District 7 on the Athens-Clarke County Commission it's been discussed at great length this evening your contributions to the conversation on affordable housing. Well, there's a number of pieces with affordable housing that are important. I think the inclusionary zoning piece that's going on right now is great and I think it's gonna help. What that does is it incentivizes developers that are developing large unit areas to develop some of those as smaller units smaller than the normal requirements and even takes down the parking minimums for those unit areas. And dramatically as those I understand would fairly dramatically give us disparities in housing cost and I'm gonna make up some numbers here. This is an $800,000 house and next to it is a $200,000 house. Is the market in your estimation gonna respond to that? Well, it's not houses, it's units within a complex for the most part and they really in those places that have done this in the past, they don't do the poor door concept. You don't have this person's house looks or this person's unit looks like it's smaller or what have you. There are different rates on those and things like our mall redevelopment. We've talked about that using some of the inclusionary zoning in that development as we put more workforce housing possibly in there and the mall is something we've gotta get right. And we've only got one chance to do the next project that goes in there that is gonna be the best for Athens because that's a huge property. If you take the mall's area and the parking lot and you drop that on top of downtown Athens it'd be the same size. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then we'll see where that one shakes out. What do you wanna see happen there? Well, they talk about a live work play environment. I think the plans that I've seen through the planning have, they need some work yet. I like the fact that we're gonna get more housing because housing stock is an issue. I like the fact that there is going to be additional retail still there that is interesting. A little bit of the work environment. They're gonna put some green space in their planning but they really haven't, in the plans I've seen they haven't put enough things that are gonna make it really attractive to many people as far as green space, as far as sidewalks, as far as even bike lanes. Allen Jones, Candidate District 7 on the Athens-Clarke County Commission. Thanks for coming out this evening. Thank you. Finally, finally, if she's able to join us and she has been battling maybe more severely than most of us, the pollen that is concerning to all of us in recent days. She's playing in hurt here but she's gonna go for it. Commissioner Oveda Thornton in District 9. We'll see how much of the voice you have left and we'll tax it for just a few minutes. Thanks for stepping up this evening. Thank you for having me. You've heard a lot here this evening. We've discussed a lot of issues and you have the luxury of being unopposed so you can speak whatever your mind is on some of these issues. Not that that was gonna be a problem for you anyway. Good night everybody, let's go home. Give me some thoughts on what you've heard tonight as it relates to the law enforcement disparities in communities, affordable housing, the lack thereof. What do you say to some of these points that have been raised this evening? First of all, thank you again and thank everybody for coming out. Where to begin? Law enforcement, I do not support defunding the police. I think we can do some things differently. We should not have a shortage like we do have. Safety is important to everybody and maybe the message originally about defunding, maybe it just wasn't explained properly but we had two commissioners who explained it pretty well. Let's take 50% of the budget away from the Athens-Clarke County Police Department over the 10-year period. Even I understood that. Well, I didn't agree with that and I don't agree with that. I think we could take monies and trainings and do something much more productive. I think we should be encouraging our young people to be law enforcement officers. We, you know, I think the young lady who spoke earlier about when police were coming to a black community, there's a whole different reaction and I agree with that. But we as a community. Well, let me be the dumbest guy in the room for a minute. Okay, and it gets you to explain it to me because I've never been black. All right. You don't know what you're missing. I understand. I'll take you where for it. All right, but you said the police don't just randomly show up. I mean, they come to the black neighborhood the same reason they come to the white neighborhood. There's a citizen in need. There is perhaps a crime that has been committed and the police are not responding in a vacuum. They're responding to sometimes dangerous circumstances. Do you remember the Edward Wright story? It was before my time. I am familiar with the story, yes. And Edward Wright's mother called the police because he was having a mental breakdown. Mother, this was in the early mid-90s. Early 90s. Black man and... Running school morning naked. Naked. Yeah. Now, I don't care what nobody says. There was no reason to shoot that young man. But it happened. And most black people, that's what we relate to. That's what that image. And I'm sorry, but that's an example. Well, let me fast forward because we can, we don't have to go back to the early 90s. We can go back to 2019. We had six officer-involved shootings, five of them deadly, and in terms of race and ethnicity, to use the word, we were pretty diverse. It was white folks, it was black folks, Asian, even a woman who was caught up in that. But you know, I don't think it's all... Every one of those, I should say, we're deemed justifiable. But I don't think it's about race per se. That's where I'm trying to get to. I think that how our minds are trained, there's a series called Hacking Your Mind. And how there are things that we are educated subliminally that we just get embedded. I feel whenever anybody is killed by police or a police person, I feel just as bad for that police officer. I don't know what he's went through, going through, his family's going to go through. So I don't want to seem empathetic or lack of concern, but I do think that we as a community, and when you talk, I think someone mentioned our role as commissioners, I think we should be supportive, and I think we should be listening, and I think we should address these issues. I'm going to go ahead on, because I heard a conversation about progressives. I feel as I'm about the most progressive person alive. Progressive means moving forward. It doesn't mean tearing stuff down and try to figure out how you're going to build it back up later. We need to listen to constituents more. We should get involved. If anybody's trying to do anything to improve the lives of people, that's being progressive. What else was- Just quickly, because I know it was the big issue for tonight, we'll let you deal with this for a couple of minutes, then we'll hit the bottom of the hour and get everybody home. Discuss affordable housing. Affordable housing is what you can afford. I think we make that too hard. And I do believe there's a place for everyone. Next, April the 30th, I will be working with a group hosting an affordable housing conference at, go ahead. Clark Central, Clark Central. But the reason why this is different, we're bringing in zoning people, persons, we're bringing in developers, we're bringing in the different types of housing, modular homes, mobile homes, apartments, we're gonna have people speak. We're even going to talk about the homeless encampment. There is no one solution to affordable housing, but it takes all of these entities to make it happen. Well, Novita Thornton, thanks for stepping up this evening. Thanks for your service behind the rail. Thanks to all of these candidates. I just wanna ask a question before everybody gets out of here. I wanna ask just a couple of questions of the audience. Let me begin by, and I don't need you to shout out names or any of that. I mean, do what you want, but I just wanna see a show of hands. You came in here, let's talk about the mayor's race, okay? You came in here with a candidate, I'm gonna vote for that person. Are you still gonna vote for that person? All right, hands down. Did you change your mind? I was gonna vote for him, now I'm gonna vote for that other one. Anybody at all have a mind change tonight? Anybody change their mind? Let me ask this question this way. Anyone change their mind about the commission candidate they plan to vote for? I see like two hands, three hands. Did we just waste two hours here? What? What? I don't think we did. I don't think we did. Thanks to all the candidates and thanks to the chamber for setting up. David Dye Bradley, a quick word before we get out of here. Hey everybody, a big round of applause for Tim. Thank you, thank you.