Thursday, July 19, 2012

Liquor Referendum Makes the Ballot - At Last

Clarence Stowers casts deciding vote.
The Sunday beer and wine sales referendum will be on the ballot in November! The decision came Tuesday morning at the Lumpkin County Board of Commissioners' meeting, with Commission Chairman John Raber breaking a 2 - 2 tie by voting YES to the referendum.

Commissioner Clarence Stowers, who had voted twice against the referendum, switched his vote to YES, joining Commissioner Bill Lewis on the YEAH side. Commissioners Tim Bowden and Clarence Grindle voted NO, as they had done previously when the issue was before the Board.

The pressure has been on the commissioners for months as Lumpkinites (including D&B) argued that the commissioners had denied voters the right to vote.

That public pressure seemed to be what changed Stowers' vote. When asked by The Dahlonega Nugget why he switched his vote, Stowers said he had not changed his mind on Sunday sales, but that he had changed his vote because "of the attacks," including attacks on his wife and mother. Some county employees had trouble doing their jobs because of all the calls on the Sunday sales issue, he said.

No matter what his reasons may have, Dahlonega and Beyond says, "Thank you, Mr. Stowers, for joining Mr. Lewis and Mr. Raber in giving the vote back to the people."




8 comments:

  1. Hey! Do you use Twitter? I'd like to follow you if that would be ok. I'm definitely enjoying your blog and look forward to new posts.
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  2. Dear Anonymous, yes I have a Twitter account. Check out WriterDB. Not sure how clever my tweets may be, but I do tweet.

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  3. I beleive that was Comm. Bill Scott that voted yes. Bill Lewis is the city of dahl. manager.

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  4. Thank your dear Anonymous for calling this big big faux pas to my attention and sorry Bill Lewis. I meant, of course, Commissioner Bill Scott. So much for my copy editing abilities.

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  5. Now if the vote passes , which I'm sure it will, ww can have more bad drivers on the roads in lumpkin county to go along with the texters of cell phones, can we come up with a new charge? drunk while texting manslaughter? lets give that one a 10 year prison sentence, that should stop them them from doing it HAHAHAHAHAHA! I know the county needs more tax revenue, and the liqueur sales will help it, that way the country commissioners can find more ways to blow our tax revenue!

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    1. For the life of me, I can not understand why people think that by making wine and beer sales legal on Sunday that we will suddenly have a massive increase in traffic accidents, drunken texting and drunken cell phone use. Anyway, the people of Lumpkin now have the right to decide which way they want to vote on liquor sales. Just because we have the election, doesn't mean the referendum will pass.

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  6. Two suburbanites leave Atlanta for life in the mountains.

    now please go back to what you have already ruined, instead of ruining our area

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    1. Thank you for such a 'warm' welcome. Fortunately, your attitude doesn't reflect that of the gracious people who have warmly welcomed us to Lumpkin. We could have relocated to so many areas, but we were drawn to Lumpkin because of the friendly people and the small town atmosphere that reflected the towns we grew up in.

      We love Lumpkin. We love Dahlonega. We love the choice we made to live here (even though there may be a grump or two like you here.)

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