Meetings were not attended well?
I hurriedly drove to the Watkinsville beer and wine hearing at 5:55 pm and the doors were locked tight on the Community Center. When I got back in my truck, I saw the Oconee Enterprise newspaper reporter Blake Giles coming out the place where the Watkinsville City Council holds its meetings. I guess we will have to wait for yet another one of his breathtaking reports about how the evils of alcohol will destroy the moral fabric of Watkinsville as we know it so we can get some actualities of residents who could make it back home before 6:00 pm.
So then I drove over to the MACORTS meeting at Oconee Veterans Park and the people there could not have been more friendly. I think there were only four people who recorded their viewpoints. They asked where we live, where we worked, where we would commute to on public transportaton, and offered up some other suggestions. I arrived in the park just as Chairman G. Melvin Davis of the Oconee County Board of Commissioners was departing the park. I applaud him for making the effort, unlike so many other people. I saw Melvin the night before interviewed on WNEG TV 32 basically poo-poo-ing the idea that anyone in Oconee County wants any form whatsoever of any kind of mass transit. Melvin once confided in me that indeed Gainesville State College's Oconee County Campus could indeed use a bus from Athens to transport the thousands of students who attend there back when I was able to maybe do something about it.
Transportation issues are not going to be solved in a few meetings. There are many problems and challenges awaiting the MACORTS people. We do need mass transit for the elderly immediately in Oconee, and yes I know the Senior Center has a van. We need bike lanes not beside the road. We need to expand the lanes on 316 between the By-Pass and the Connector on both sides of the bridge. We need to have more traffic signals, especially at the new park and old Herman C. Michael. We need to connect the high schools and middle schools. We need to provide more sidewalks for our subdivisions and connect those neighborhoods together.
Unlike a lot of my GOP friends in Oconee County, I know that government can and will do good for our area and families. I do not look to government to solve my problems, but I am confident in their ability to provide a better answer to the areas we can all agree needs addressing. I do not remain optimistic that the current set of leaders will address any problems which will make them stick their necks out with tough answers to serious questions. In other words, I am not confident in the ability of our duly elected government to take a politically unpopular stance on some serious issues like hooking up to the bullet train to Atlanta.
So then I drove over to the MACORTS meeting at Oconee Veterans Park and the people there could not have been more friendly. I think there were only four people who recorded their viewpoints. They asked where we live, where we worked, where we would commute to on public transportaton, and offered up some other suggestions. I arrived in the park just as Chairman G. Melvin Davis of the Oconee County Board of Commissioners was departing the park. I applaud him for making the effort, unlike so many other people. I saw Melvin the night before interviewed on WNEG TV 32 basically poo-poo-ing the idea that anyone in Oconee County wants any form whatsoever of any kind of mass transit. Melvin once confided in me that indeed Gainesville State College's Oconee County Campus could indeed use a bus from Athens to transport the thousands of students who attend there back when I was able to maybe do something about it.
Transportation issues are not going to be solved in a few meetings. There are many problems and challenges awaiting the MACORTS people. We do need mass transit for the elderly immediately in Oconee, and yes I know the Senior Center has a van. We need bike lanes not beside the road. We need to expand the lanes on 316 between the By-Pass and the Connector on both sides of the bridge. We need to have more traffic signals, especially at the new park and old Herman C. Michael. We need to connect the high schools and middle schools. We need to provide more sidewalks for our subdivisions and connect those neighborhoods together.
Unlike a lot of my GOP friends in Oconee County, I know that government can and will do good for our area and families. I do not look to government to solve my problems, but I am confident in their ability to provide a better answer to the areas we can all agree needs addressing. I do not remain optimistic that the current set of leaders will address any problems which will make them stick their necks out with tough answers to serious questions. In other words, I am not confident in the ability of our duly elected government to take a politically unpopular stance on some serious issues like hooking up to the bullet train to Atlanta.
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