 Welcome to the Athens Politics Nerd podcast where we break down Mayor and Commission meetings into short informative clips. Let's do it. As you may have heard, Commissioner Mariah Parker stepped down from their post, so we only had nine commissioners at the September voting meeting last Tuesday. There were many items on the agenda like normal, so I'm going to focus on just homelessness, transit funding, and the debate over lowering quorum at commission meetings, which was a fun one. But first, homelessness. Athens has had increasing problems with keeping housing affordable and with homelessness, and that's only gotten worse as prosperity capital partners bought up dozens of duplexes a few months ago and jacked up the rent, displacing many people from their homes. Residents of Lexington Heights held a press conference to protest these rent hikes on August 31st. There is a current shortage of affordable housing in Athens-Corten County. Even though the residents that have accepted to leave have nowhere to go, the actions decided on by the ownership and management will have a significant adverse impact on the entire community. The entire community here in Athens, Georgia will be affected if everybody lose their residents. And we are homeless. A lot of us do not have nowhere to go. And we cannot pass way, way extremely too high. Since this has been a growing problem for a while, it's kind of shocking that the ACC government doesn't have a long-term plan to address the situation. But hopefully soon, we will. The commission voted 8-1 to approve the creation of such a plan at their September meeting. Yes, you heard that right. Someone voted no. That was Commissioner Oveda Thornton. Here's your reasoning. We do too many studies and surveys and we still have a problem. We give money to certain groups and organizations and we don't have no accountability. We don't even question some of the things that we spend our money on. This is not no new issue. Again, I'm not going to vote for any more plans and studies and questionnaires. Give me something hardcore action where people can pull up their sleeves, make it happen, and move on. But as Commissioner Carol Meyers pointed out, this plan is actually very important for us to secure additional funding in the future to help us tackle this problem. I think this group has a proven track record and I think it gives us something to move forward with. And what I'm seeing consistently is that there's a lot of federal money to address some of these issues and we have to address homelessness. This is not something we can take, we can solve out of our general budget. We have to be using the monies we have to leverage other monies at the state and at the federal level. When those granting agencies are looking where to put their funds, they're looking at who's most prepared, who has a plan in place, and I think this will get us there. So I'm happy to support this. The plan will also help to coordinate the actions of many different nonprofits and government agencies we have in town working on the problem of homelessness. I'll certainly be reporting on this plan once it's completed. The Mayor and Commission also approved about $800,000 of Community Development Block Grant funding to help fight this problem. Community Development Block Grant funding comes from the federal government and it's intended to help us improve housing and to help provide economic opportunities. This year, as $800,000 was ready to be dispersed to nonprofits like Project Safe, The Arc, and Advantage Behavioral, our story on prosperity capital partners broke. And thanks to some help from Commissioner Tim Denson, it caused the local government to switch focus from the long-term problem to this immediate need that dozens of people are facing right now in Athens. Moving on to transit funding. Athens Transit needed an extra $225,000 this year to tide them over until some federal money comes in. We found out in June that the federal grant would be arriving later than anticipated. And so that's the reason for this extra funding need this year. It also means that less money will be needed for transit next year. So while approving the extra funding was a no-brainer for commissioners, they used the opportunity to have a discussion about transit funding in general. Here's what Commissioner Russell Edwards had to say about it. I'm disappointed in the way transit has been managed by this county. How is somebody going to wait an hour on Atlanta Highway to ride the bus in the rain? I mean, you drive down Atlanta Highway, you see folks, I mean, we don't have shelters for bus stops. You know, why don't people ride the bus? Well, they don't like to stand in the rain for an hour. Maybe we could have a bus-only lane on Atlanta Highway. I think those are really some of the solutions that I'm trying to wrap my head around to make the bus a place where everyone rides. I think Fair Free has been a program with a good intent. I mean, I look at it as an anti-poverty program. And that's good. I think that's what I see it accomplishing. But I'm really interested when we're talking about transit, how do we enhance the quality of service of transit? How does Fair Free work in there? I'm not convinced how right now, based on the information in front of me, but I look forward to the study. I'm going to support this. But Denson pushed back on the idea that it's Fair Free that's preventing Athens transit from expanding routes or increasing frequency. We actually have, to my understanding, the most expansive service that we've ever had before while we have zero fare. We go further into the northern parts of the county. We now have Uber trips plugged into it. We now have microtransit involved in it also. And pretty soon here, more frequency, the most frequency we've ever had on Prince Avenue and North Avenue. But our fare boxes, people get really, I think confused by how much money came in those fare boxes. UGA students, of course, didn't pay a fare directly. So the people who actually were using the fare boxes, they only collected $400,000 roughly a year. And that was mainly on the backs of low-income folks who had to use, and actually the largest purchaser of fares after UGA was Clark County School District. And the next purchaser after that was Athens Area Homeless Shelter and other homeless shelter providers. Money that we were giving to those providers, they were having to use that money to give it back to us to buy fares. Very ineffective use of funds. Farefree transit is funded in Athens through Teesblast until 2027. Okay, now what we've all been waiting for, the great quorum debate. Most people who follow the commission know that not all commissioners see eye to eye on all issues. That's putting it mildly. But not as many people realize that the minority faction of moderate commissioners has almost given up on governing completely over the past few years. They usually show up to vote against progressive proposals, yes, but their attendance at work sessions, retreats, and even executive sessions has been somewhat subpar. And sometimes they're late to voting sessions, which can delay the start of meetings. That's why Mayor Gertz is asking the commission to lower quorum requirements from seven commissioners down to six. If they did this, they'd only need six commissioners to be present before they could start a meeting or vote on something. But it seems like there aren't many commissioners in favor of doing this. Here's Commissioner Allison Wright. I'm not real sure where the motivation is on this. I did check with the clerk and she confirmed that we have had no regular scheduled voting meetings that did not have a quorum. Maybe somebody was tardy and we had to start a little bit later. But the regular scheduled meeting, which provides transparency to the community on our votes has not missed a quorum. So that was an important thing for me. I'm against this in many ways. Commissioner Denson says he's on the fence. And yeah, I do believe that's true that we have not had any called voting meetings. But I do know for a fact that we have had called executive meetings that have not had quorum that we were not able to hold those meetings. So I know those times I came here to City Hall, sat here in City Hall, and then wasted my time because we didn't have enough commissioners showing up. So I had to go home and we had to reschedule that meeting. So I do think so the business of a lot as we all know, a lot of things have to happen in the executive session. Those are those those meanings are extremely important. I think we all know that and that has been I think that is what led us to having this on the agenda. That's correct. Another hand, Commissioner Jesse Huell is strongly opposed. So my current feeling is that I'm opposed to making this change. I believe that it's important that we have a high bar for quorum. I think it's important that the people who are elected to this body do show up and do show up regularly and that a super majority of us are present in making decisions. I believe in the value of that. I'm inclined to want to keep quorum at seven. But that said, you know, I've sat here too many times and waited to achieve quorum or never gotten it and had to go home. And I hate that it's an agenda item like this that is drawing that conversation into the light. I know that the press hasn't found it newsworthy enough to report on, but we've had real attendance issues. The other thing is that we've had real attendance issues with things where quorum isn't relevant. We have attendance issues that are retreats. We have attendance issues at our work sessions. We have attendance issues at our agenda settings. Things where we don't need quorum to do business because no decisions are being made as what's legally defined as business. But certainly discussions are happening that are very fundamental and germane to the decisions we will make. Commissioner Mike Canby also opposes lowering quorum. But he says he'll still probably not show up to some work sessions and definitely not retreats. You know, I think a lot of this has to do with scheduling too. When we get a notice that there's an executive session 24 hours before the next day in the executive session, you know, if there's decisions being made in executive session or a vote being determined in executive session, that should not be happening either there or at the retreats. You know, if you want a presence of this commission at the retreat, let's have a substantive retreat. I personally don't need to be playing games for your passive watermelons or whatever else it is to build to build a team. If we're going to talk about the issues, I'll be there and I am there. But but I don't I don't need I don't need that sort of retreat. Cool shot back calling this a negligence of duty, which made him be a little angry. The onus is on us to show up at the thing we don't think is useful and voice that concern. The onus is on us to show up at the meeting and and vote against going into executive session if that's what we disagree with. But just not showing up is an is an unclear, I think negligence of duty. And the other thing that I think is important to recognize is that things that are being devalued like part of our staff morale issues is that they get us together for a work session or a retreat. And there's three of us there. And I'm tired of hearing our staff get praised in these meetings when the cameras are rolling, but have no one in the retreat or in the work session to hear them out. I'm tired of sitting in agenda settings and having people walk out before they're over. And it's not just executive sessions that are announced last minute. These are executive sessions that have been announced far in advance and been scheduled at the end of agenda setting or voting meetings. And then people have left our meetings early, including meetings that didn't go very late, instead of sticking around for that. I don't think we need any lecturing tonight. I mean, a lot of us behind the table graphs the issues. We have the capacity to understand what's going on and what's happening at these work sessions and what's happening at the manager's office, send us materials that we read and reread and the public has these materials as well. So what I'm saying is this, I appreciate you not wanting to take hasty action and change in the charter. I think that's important because the folks in this community voted on this charter 30 years ago and it's lasted for that for that long. All I'm saying is that perhaps we need to be a little bit more mindful of the public's time and our time and how we're scheduling these meetings and what's being discussed at these retreats, what's being discussed at these work sessions. When these work sessions last until 11 o'clock at night, what public is benefiting from that? What are we benefiting from that? And that's all I'm saying is let's do a better job of scheduling. As an example, next week we've got two work sessions scheduled and that's a lot for the public and one of them was a special session. So that's a lot for the public and it's a lot for this commission and a lot of these subjects are subjects that you want on the work session commissioner role and only you. The commission will continue discussing the idea of lowering quorum next month. Yay! Okay, last thing are two zoning change proposals, one for a townhouse development on Olympic Drive and the other for a temporary frat house on West Hancock that were withdrawn by the applicants. So those aren't happening anymore, don't worry. And that about wraps it up. We'll have more exciting commission meeting coverage in future episodes. And if you want to help me keep making these podcasts, please become an APN member at AthensPoliticsNerd.com slash join. I'll see you on the next one.