By Tara DeRock Mahoney
Senior Staff Writer

    Sidewalks, parking spaces, retaining walls and drainage fields will be installed in Madison’s new Town Park in the coming weeks, making visible for the first time concrete advancements in the development of the space.
    The grading on the site—handled gratis by the county—has been complete for nearly a month, but other contracts were delayed by complications in the bid process. As of this week, Madison’s Downtown Development Association has either signed or expects to sign contracts for curb, gutter and drainage; retaining walls, steps and walkways within the park; and the renovation of the 19th-century cottage on the property.
    City and DDA officials are particularly eager to see sidewalks and parking spaces go in around the park.
    “I call that the picture frame that will frame the park,” said City Manager David Nunn at the Madison City Council’s regular meeting Monday night.
    Contract “2.1,” as the DDA calls it, for the curbs and gutters, has already been signed; Rendrag Construction could have that work complete within 90 days. “2.2,” the contract for the retaining wall and walkways, was approved by the DDA at its regular meeting Tuesday morning, pending final approval of the bid documents.
    “You’re a long way toward where you want to be, with [the completion of] 2.2,” said Nunn.
    And contract “2.3,” the work on the cottage, has already been bid on but DDA members will not select a contractor for a couple more weeks, at least, as they plan to conduct interviews with each of the bidders.

By Matthew Burgoyne
Staff Writer

Trimble Bridge Road was abandoned by the county in July 2006, but the memories and history of the area still live on.     
The old steel bridge, built across the Apalachee River separating Morgan and Greene counties, is one of the oldest in the county. Due to weathering and age, the bridge was in disrepair by the early 1990s.             In March 2005, the two property owners adjacent to Trimble Bridge Road asked the county to abandon it. The two land owners were Bill Zachary and Weyerhaeuser, a corporation that works with forest land development. Both parties cited similar reasons for why they wanted the county to abandon the land – trespassing and loitering. Because it was happening on their land, both Zachary and Weyerhaeuser had an interest in stopping the problem.     
As senior planner for Morgan County, Allison Moon has to consider situations like this. When the county was asked to abandon the property, a lot of thought had to be put into the decision.     
“We don’t want the bridge taken down, but we also don’t want to designate the bridge as a public access recreational facility or access point,” Moon said.     
Creating a recreational facility would be difficult at Trimble Bridge. The road leading to the structure is curvy and graveled. As the road goes farther, it gets thinner and less maintained. Currently, there is a locked gate about a mile down the road.

‘Morgan–Made’ wave of local ag marketing effort?

Story by Tara Derock Mahoney • photo by Angelina Bellebuono

By Tara DeRock Mahoney
Senior Staff Writer

    A lightning strike downtown Friday night near the Emergency-911 building short-circuited several networks and damaged some equipment in county buildings.
    “We had several computers damaged, some phones, some network cards,” said County Manager Michael Lamar.
    The lightning hit in the vicinity of a tower behind the E-911 building and impacted services in that structure as well as in the county election offices and the Creamery. Some systems in the county archives building were also affected.
    “I was coming into the 911 building at about 8:30 p.m. Friday night, when there was a lightning strike somewhere behind me,” said Bill Crew, the director of 911 services. “As I walked in, there was a second strike…I don’t think it was a direct hit, but it was very close.”
    Crew said that the 911 staff noticed almost immediately that their computers were defunct. “We were looking at that ‘blue screen of death,’” Crew said with a laugh. “We lost contact with the Georgia Crime Information Center…and our weather service.”
    The county was running as normal by Tuesday morning.
    “One of the advantages to re-locating the 911 services to the [former] Denon building is that we’ll have a little bit more protection from events like this, a little more distance from the towers,” said Lamar.

By Tara DeRock Mahoney
Senior Staff Writer

    Representatives from the Atlanta Community Food Bank (ACFB) were in town last Thursday to meet with those who provide food locally to low-income families.
    ACFB was gauging interest in a new Atlanta-Morgan delivery route for food ordered from the ACFB for local residents.
    A number of local help providers could benefit from and take advantage of ACFB’s services.
    “We have a problem in Madison and Morgan County with people starving, and that’s a fact,” said Jim NeSmith, who frequently helps locals through the Madison Baptist Church.
    ACFB is a clearinghouse for donated foods destined for people in need all over northern Georgia and metro Atlanta. The agency distributes 21 million pounds of food each year to soup kitchens, churches, food pantries—anyone who provides food to low-income families. The agencies purchase the food from ACFB for 16 cents per pound, and the ACFB delivers it for free.
    All of the local aid agencies present for the meeting with the ACFB, including the Caring Place, DFCS, the Senior Center, ACTION, Inc. and others, report an increase in recent months of the number of people and families they are serving.
    In Madison, the Caring Place provides groceries to about 150 families, twice per month.
    Loss of income, high utility bills, high fuel costs, and higher gas prices have contributed to the rising number of families in need of food aid.
    Morgan County Family Connection Coordinator Karen Robertson said that anecdotal evidence also supports a growing number of people in the county seeking food stamps and rent and utilities assistance.

By Tara DeRock Mahoney
Senior Staff Writer

    A hundred years ago, land-development patterns were pretty straightforward. Farmers lived out in the country; nearly everyone else was located near town.
    Fast-forward a century, to a time when nearly every citizen has a motor vehicle. Even those who are not farmers can live and enjoy the rural life, because groceries and needed goods are just a short car-ride away. Accordingly, a current look at a county development map does not show clusters of homes surrounded by huge swathes of farmland; instead, the county is uniformly covered with land parcels of 50 acres or less. Most of the huge farming operations of the 19th and early 20th centuries have been broken up into myriad, smaller homeplaces; and while large tracts of undeveloped land still exist, they do not abound as they once did.
    Does this mean that agriculture is going the way of the wind? Hardly. In fact, Morgan County growers and producers today are looking at new and innovative ways of keeping farming local and viable (see related story above). But these smaller homesteads, nestled as they are amongst farms all over the county, mean that the centuries-old pattern of town-center development has shifted—and attitudes toward development must shift also.
    “We’re proposing some really sophisticated land-control measures,” said Morgan County Senior Planner Allison Moon at the county’s most recent agricultural land-use discussion meeting. “Is there a future for [agricultural] land other than subdivision? Or, how do we allow families to sell and subdivide their land while preserving the rural character of Morgan?”