I visited Athens earlier this week for the next stop on my Georgia politics road trip. It was the first day of classes at the University of Georgia.
But the city of about 130,000 isn’t just home to the Georgia Bulldogs. It’s also the center of one of the most extreme political dynamics in the state.
While the Athens-Clarke County consolidated government is one of the most liberal local governments in Georgia, Athens is also home base for Gov. Brian Kemp, Georgia’s first lifelong Republican governor, and U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde, the gun-store entrepreneur-turned-congressman of Jan. 6 was just “a normal tourist visit” fame.
How do these political polar opposites coexist in what is physically the smallest county in Georgia? Mostly with people talking to each other.
“You just have to constantly engage and be willing to have a difficult conversation, but come back to the table again, and again, and again,” said Kelly Girtz, the former middle school social studies teacher and administrator who is now the mayor of consolidated Athens-Clarke County.
Corralling 7th graders might be the perfect preparation for the task he has now, navigating between a batch of newly elected progressive commissioners, a General Assembly and congressional delegation of nearly all Republicans, and constituents who span the political spectrum from liberal intellectual professors to rural, county line conservatives.
Girtz said he has good working relationships with Kemp and U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, although he’s never spoken with Clyde. Although Athens’ representation in Atlanta and Washington “does not reflect the city, no doubt about it,” he tries to find areas of agreement to work with Republicans on anyway.
“There’s a tendency in public life these days to kind of be showy,” he said. “Sometimes I would rather not be showy, I would just rather focus all my energy on doing the stuff.”
“The stuff” for him is making sure poor and working-class people can still afford to live in Athens, amid the prosperity that’s rushing into it.
He also wants to cover the gaps in health care, mentoring for local kids, and more and better public spaces.
“I wouldn’t call it a ‘liberal hotbed,’ I’d call it a progressive hotbed,” he joked of the politics inside the city itself.
But just how liberal are we talking?
While Republicans have been railing against COVID mandates around the country, the local commissioner voted earlier this month for an indoor mask mandate, approved $100 incentives to get people to take the COVID-19 vaccine, and instructed the city manager to move toward requiring all city-county employees be vaccinated against COVID, too.
They also approved a plan to put a temporary homeless encampment on the site of an old Athens school.
The homeless encampment is one of several recent moves from the commission that caught the eye of state Rep. Houston Gaines, a Republican who grew up in Athens and now represents portions of the city and more conservative Jackson, Oconee and Barrow counties in the state House.
Gaines called the encampment “a really bad idea” and was so bothered last year by a proposal from two commissioners to cut Athens’ Police Department funding by 50% that he passed a new law to prevent local governments from cutting police funds by more than 5% in a single year.
“I really think that a big part of my job is to make sure that Athens remains a place that is the envy of the state and in this region,” he said. “If we go way off into left field then I have concerns about what that would mean for the future of Athens and the surrounding areas.”
Despite their political differences, the mayor and Gaines only have nice things to say about the other, including observations from both that the other may not be not as partisan as he seems.
To that point, along with curbing homelessness and addressing mental health, the mayor is also bullish on attracting new corporations to Clarke County, including a new headquarters and manufacturing plant for a company co-founded by a UGA researcher.
“Through engagement and relationship building, we have been able to get inventions when they hit the private market to land right here,” he said.
Construction is big business in the booming city, too.
The fate of the Varsity’s old Athens location may be the best example of the direction the city is headed. The iconic low-slung building and its massive black-top parking lot will soon be replaced by a four-story mixed-use development, with units reserved for affordable housing.
On our drive through the county, Girtz also points out walking paths that will eventually connect two large trailer parks to Athens and nearby Winterville, at the eye-popping cost of $1 million per mile.
That and a series of other projects are covered by several local option sales taxes. Girtz acknowledges the improvements sound expensive, but says are a part of the city’s focus on “the long game.”
Now almost three years into his job, with almost half of that during the global pandemic, the mayor says he’s not at all tired of it.
He’s planning to run for reelection and has plans for the next term if he’s re-elected, including redeveloping strip malls to create more affordable housing and finding ways to make the city and county more livable for more people.
“It’s critical to me that we not be a caricature of progressivism, but that we’re doing the tangible stuff that makes people’s lives better,” he said.
The drive back to Atlanta from Clarke through Barrow and Gwinnett counties invariably includes traffic on state highway 316, I-85, or both.
The same explosive growth that has overhauled Atlanta’s politics is headed for Athens, too, the mayor predicted.
“Barrow County of 2032 is going to be like the Gwinnett County of today,” he said of the newly Democratic Gwinnett. To the North, conservative Jackson County is growing nearly as fast.
Sandwiched in between them will be Athens. What the city’s, or the state’s, political future will look like then is anyone’s guess.
This article is the fifth installment of the AJC’s Georgia Politics Road Trip series, reporting from the road on the politics throughout the state.
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