Athens-Clarke County commissioners voted to approve two consultant-authored reports addressing affordable housing and homelessness prevention and reduction at their meeting Tuesday night.
Discussion of the two reports, which make suggestions for dealing with the homelessness and affordable housing issues, dominated both the public comment portion of the meeting and discussion among commissioners during a nearly five-hour marathon meeting.
The two plans sparked skepticism among some commissioners at work sessions in recent months, but passed with some compromise measures written into the plans by an ideologically diverse group of commissioners.
District 9 Commissioner Ovita Thornton co-authored the CDO, or commission-defined option, on the affordable housing report.
“I think our CDO gives some objectives and directions that [the original report] was lacking,” Thornton said.
Under that CDO, some seven million dollars in funding was attached to the report to provide for construction of new affordable housing. The plan passed 9-1.
A report detailing strategies to address homelessness passed unanimously. District 5’s Dexter Fisher, while supportive of the report, was critical of how long it has taken to get to this point.
“These things should have happened two years ago,” Fisher said. “We should have been talking about these things then. Now we're at the 11th hour, and we’ve got to do a transition plan that we knew we had to do a year ago. So I apologize to the public first of all, because we have failed you.”
That transition plan that Fisher referred to is another homelessness-related measure taken up by the commission last night. By a vote of 8-2, commissioners approved a plan to shut down the county’s homeless encampment and transition its residents to different housing using hotel vouchers.
