Kelly Girtz is in his final term as mayor of Athens-Clarke County, which has more than 128,000 residents.
Q: Alright, so you’ve had a long history of working in the Athens community, from education to District 9 commissioner. What inspired you to become the mayor?
A: I really wanted to sort of have just a healthier and stronger community, and it was a good time, and so I threw my name in the hat, and lo and behold, the voters liked what they saw.
Q: What events do you make a point to go to every year?
A: So I mean, almost every year I go to Twilight Criterium. Every year that I can, I like to go out to AthFest to listen to music. There are always a bunch of sort of back to school sorts of events, so that’s a pretty busy time of year. There’s something that the Downtown Development Authority and a couple different campus units do for incoming freshmen called North of the Arch, just to get people to kind of know what’s out there in the community.
Q: With the University of Georgia being in the heart of Athens, is there a push to involve students with the local community?
A: Students are just an integral part of Athens, and so every year there are kids who are volunteering at our community centers, who are working as interns here, in lots of different departments, who are getting jobs here. So, yeah, there’s, there’s a ton of overlap all the time.
Q: What are the biggest problems that you see facing Athens right now?
A: We’ve got a lot of the same challenges that any other sort of growing American community has. Housing has gotten really expensive and just hard to find, which are obviously connected circumstances. The very roughest tale of that is that there are more homeless people than there were 15 years ago, because some people simply can’t afford a place to be at all.
Q: What lasting impact do you want to leave on Athens?
A: Among the things that I really have put a lot of energy toward is just kind of making sure that there was more opportunity for everybody who lives in Athens. So, for people who might have grown up in poverty or in a neighborhood that wasn’t as well-resourced to make sure that there were routes out of poverty and to make sure that we were able to do what was necessary to bring resources to those neighborhoods. So, the neighborhood redevelopment happening just two blocks north of here along College Avenue is a good example of that.
Q: Is there anything I haven’t asked you today that you would like to add?
A: Among the great things about Athens is that we’re a really creative community, and we’re not a homogeneous place. We’re a place with a lot of different people from different backgrounds that speak different languages, and I think, bring more to the party than you know if we were a single-faceted community. So, it’s a lovely piece of Athens life and character.
Comments trimmed for length and clarity.
Ziggy Moon is a journalism major covering the city-county government beat in Reporting I in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.
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