Farmland Preservation Activists Call Thursday Meeting To Prepare For SPLOST Referendum

Oconee County farmland activist Russ Page and Laura Hall from the Athens Land Trust have called a meeting for Thursday to push for inclusion of funding for farmland protection in the county’s 2015 Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax.

The meeting comes before two oportunities—on Jan. 13 and Feb. 10—for citizens to indicate what projects they want to have included in the language for the next SPLOST referendum, scheduled to be held May 20 of this year.

Those meetings will start at 6 p.m. at the Civic Center on Hog Mountain Road.

Following those sessions, the Oconee County Board of Commissioners will have to sort through citizen initiatives as well as $137 million in requests already put forward by county department heads and elected officials.

The Commissioners are scheduled to vote on March 4 to put the tax on the ballot and to designate projects to be funded should voters approve the tax in May. The total project list is likely to be for less than $40 million.

The meeting called by Page and Hall will start at 7 p.m. at the Oconee County Library on Experiment Station Road in Watkinsville.

For more on this story, go to Oconee County Observations.