Athens-Clarke County Mayor Kelly Girtz demanded that grants rescinded by the U.S. Department of Justice be restored to the state and local governing bodies.
The federal grants, initially calculated as $820 million, were rescinded in April after the Trump administration sought to cut federal spending. Many of the grants were multi-year grants to reduce violence that were already being implemented, so the real value of the remaining money taken by the DOJ was about $500 million.
“I demand that these (grants) be restored, because that’s for the good of every man, woman and child in our state and in our nation,” Girtz said in a Sept. 23 press conference at City Hall.
Girtz said the Athens-Clarke County Unified Government has been affected by these retractions. Some grants involving clean energy and traffic improvements were pulled, he said at the news conference, which was focused on public safety.
One project involving the “whole Hawthrone corridor” was stripped of its approved funding after receiving its planning grant. Girtz said usually a given project would receive a planning grant in year one and then receive an implementation grant, used for building the project, in year two or three. The implementation grant was frozen for the project because of the retractions in April, but the mayor is hopeful.
That building money has gotten frozen, so we’re hoping for future unfreezes but we will see,” Girtz said.
Although the Hawthorne corridor project is at a standstill, Girtz and the commission have approved a redesign of the intersection between Hawthorne and Oglethorpe avenues, out of concern for public safety, he said.
County officials concluded that this was the most challenged intersection in the county after evaluating where the most dangerous accidents — involving T-bone or head-on collisions — occurred.
The redesign will include the removal of the “slip” lane in the northwest quadrant of the intersection in order to reduce speeds and the replacement of the traffic signals with new ones that utilize the yellow blinking left-turn signal. It will also implement high visibility crosswalks with Americans with Disabilities Act ramps and wider sidewalks, as well as a short two-way turn lane to accommodate mid-block left turns into the YMCA and other driveways.
Girtz said this future improvement of public safety will be rolled out in the next year. It symbolizes a greater commitment from the ACC government to increase public safety in all its aspects, which are numerous by the mayor’s definition.
“Public safety is making sure that people have their basic human needs met,” Girtz said. “Because when those cornerstone elements of people’s lives are well taken care of – people have good places to live, if they have health care, good employment opportunities — that’s going to mean we have a safer community.”
Kristopher Wilhelm is a journalism major in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.
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