ATHENS COUNTY, Ohio — One way or another, the Nov. 3 midterm election will herald a new era for the Athens County Board of Commissioners, which has been helmed since 2013 by the same three Democrats, all men.
Commissioner Lenny Eliason has served seven terms since his initial appointment to the board in 1998. He declined to seek an eighth term and will roll off the board after this year.
Campaigning to fill his seat are Democrat Autumn Brown, a Nelsonville resident, and Republican Sarah Smith, an Albany resident.
A Republican has not been elected to the board since 2008. However, Athens County has grown more favorable to Republicans in recent years.
The shift toward more support for Republicans in Athens County has come as the number of registered county voters plunged by about 10,000 voters from 2000 to 2024. The county population increased slightly over the same period.
The Ohio voter registration deadline is Monday, Oct. 5.
Meet the candidates
Brown sees herself “as someone who might replace [Eliason] and continue to move Athens County forward and bring some new ideas to the table,” she told the Independent.
Brown has worked for about 30 years at the Athens County Board of Developmental Disabilities, where she currently directs the board’s Integrate Athens program, focused on education around inclusion. Through that position, Brown said she participates “on several different collaborative county-wide teams.” She mentioned Project Co-Create, led by the Athens County Foundation and focused on housing insecurity; the Creating Healthy Communities initiative through the Athens City-County Health Department, focused on healthy eating and active living; and the Comcorps program, which places service members at local organizations to address social determinants of health.
“It just felt like a really good fit that I was ready to transition to serving the county in a bigger way with the skills that I have acquired through my years of service,” she said.
Brown said her experience managing county-operated budgets will lend itself to the commission, as will her strategic planning experience and “collaborative spirit.”
Smith, meanwhile, won election to the Athens County Republican central committee in the May primary, representing Alexander East. She’s also a farmer and small business owner, according to her website.
In her interview with the Independent, Smith said she would focus on representing Athens County residents outside the city of Athens.
“I’ve went to every township, every village, and talked to every trustee, every council member, and heard their thoughts of what’s been going on in their areas, where they think that the county’s lacking, what they think [the commissioners are] doing well,” Smith said. “I keep hearing the same things from everybody: ‘Don’t forget about us out here. They don’t do anything out for us out here.’ … I don’t wanna be like that.”
Smith also works in human resources and said she would leverage that experience as commissioner.
“I strive to be an ear for everybody –– help where I can or find answers that I don’t know the answer to right then,” she said.
Brown also emphasized the importance of listening to all county residents, saying she has proven through her county leadership experience “that I will listen and that I will take that information, and then I do the research, and I will do the work that it takes to be able to develop a plan.”
Priorities
Smith said she’s “running to bring transparency and accountability back to county government.”
“I think for too long things have been done in the back room and the boardroom,” Smith said. “I think we need somebody who wants to be responsible with taxpayer dollars, support economic development and strengthen our townships, villages, first responders, and make sure that every corner of Athens County has a voice.”
She said she does not see many of the most pressing issues in the county as partisan, referencing oversight of the county engineer’s office and county roads, ambulance response times, economic development initiatives, and property taxes.
Brown said she’s running to help the county improve in its long-term planning, so that the county can be less reactive. She said she supported Chauncey in its strategic planning in 2021, which helped the village secure millions in grant funds for infrastructure.
Brown like to do the same for the county, emphasizing the need to plan for sewer infrastructure and for the possibility of a data center coming to the area.
She also sees a need to increase the transparency of the commission. “We need to communicate more than in the Tuesday meetings, more than in the minutes from those meetings,” she said. She said she would work to identify a way for the commission to spread awareness of its activities in an accessible way that “the community can quickly access.”
Where the candidates stand on Athens County issues
Data center development
Brown does not currently support a data center in the region, while Smith remains open to the possibility.
Brown said she has been researching data centers and is concerned about potential impacts on county infrastructure, impacts on local residents’ utility bills, possible environmental impacts, and noise pollution.
“There’s just all of these questions that aren’t answered,” she said. If a data center does come to the county, she said she’d want to ensure “that they are holding up to their end of the bargain, that they aren’t going to be taking from our community.”
With the county’s long history of extractive industry, Brown said, “It’d be really nice for us to have partnerships that come to our community that are beneficial, not just taking.”
Smith, meanwhile, said, “I’m never going to rule anything out, no matter what it is. I want to see the proposal. What is it going to do to benefit our area?”
Smith added that she wants to see jobs and businesses come to the area, in alignment with a development plan to ensure any initiatives would benefit the area.
Regarding what specific development initiatives might offer such benefits, Smith said, “If it’s a data center, it’s a data center.”
“I think we really need to have all of our facts before we would want to go down that road because it can be detrimental if it’s not done correctly,” she said.
In early August, the Athens County Commissioners passed a resolution opposing the development of a data center, although it is nonbinding due to a lack of county-wide zoning.
Asked whether she would support county-wide zoning, Smith said, “with zoning, you have to be careful because you don’t want to rule out other initiatives that may come to the area to bring economic development. So I’m not necessarily opposed to countywide zoning. I just think you have to be careful about the way you do it and the way you word it.”
Brown, meanwhile, said countywide zoning has historically been an upsetting prospect to rural areas in Athens County. “I’m not sure that’s the best path to go,” she said.
“I’m not afraid to explore bringing it up in our community and having a town hall meeting to talk about what do we do to protect Athens County and making sure that if a data center is coming to our community, that we have the most control that we possibly can to make sure it’s a beneficial situation,” Brown said.
Flooding
Athens County has experienced numerous floods this year, including this week. From June to September, flooding has affected businesses and nonprofits in Athens, swamped residents’ homes in Trimble, and inundated downtown Glouster.
While the county commissioners do not play a direct role in responding to floods, both Brown and Smith said they’d do their part to support other officials and aid in recovery.
Brown said she would want to “pay attention” and build relationships with village officials and volunteer fire departments.
She said it’s important as a county commissioner “to know what the capabilities are, what the gaps are. Hopefully, we can help in the future try to fill those gaps.”
Brown also said, “When state and federal funds get released during these things, we want to make sure that we’re asking for them and that we’re getting them to the residents in the communities that need them. And so, that takes a plan and knowing what’s available.”
Smith said she wants to work with officials in rural areas of Athens County to ensure residents can be connected to “the resources and the contacts and are able to reach out and get what they need to help recover in the event that they are affected by something like that.”
Smith added she’d like to help support clean-up efforts within the floodplain.
County infrastructure
Regarding county infrastructure needs, Smith said her priority would be developing the infrastructure to support more economic development projects.
“I think that there are certain areas that we could look at using for economic development, but they lack the infrastructure to support economic development,” Smith said. She’d bring together “people from all different corners to figure out what we can do to help expand infrastructure to bring economic development to our area that we so desperately need,” she said.
Brown, meanwhile, said improving sewer infrastructure throughout the county is “at the top of the list.”
“For the commissioners, the priority really is accessing funds to improve those sewer systems and supporting townships and municipalities in them when we can,” Brown said.
Plastic plant
Despite vocal public opposition, the Athens County Port Authority recently approved a lease for the Canadian plastics company CCC Plastics at its Bill Theisen Industrial Park near The Plains. The plant will manufacture plastic pellets.
Smith said she had heard “nothing but poor things from the communities” when it comes to the plant.
In terms of how she would have handled consideration of the plastics plant, Smith said she would “need all the facts.”
“I’m somebody who likes to think with the numbers and the facts, not my emotions,” Smith said. “So I want to know what exactly it’s going to do for our community, what exactly it could affect, what detrimental effects it could have, what positive effects it could have, and look at everything before a decision can or should be made.”
The Athens County Commissioners approved a tax abatement for the CCC Plastics plant at 60% for 15 years — the maximum allowable under Ohio law — through an enterprise zone agreement. The agreement means that CCC Plastics would only pay 40% of the taxes on improved property value for the next 15 years.
Smith did not say if she would have supported that measure, saying she is “not exactly opposed to tax abatements” but would want to see “what exactly they’re offering to us that is not going to cost us in the long run.”
Brown, meanwhile, said she trusts and respects the team at the port authority in their decisionmaking around the plastics plant.
However, she added, “I’m not excited about the idea of Athens County having a plastic plant in it. As commissioner, I think I would have wanted more information.” She stopped short of saying she would have opposed the facility, however, as she sees economic development benefits from the facility and is “definitely on the fence.”
Brown said the main thing she would do differently as county commissioner goes back to “transparency and communicating with the community.” She said she would have brought the proposed plant to the community’s attention as soon as it became a possibility at the end of last year.
“The port authority has gone through a lot of work, and I feel really bad that the community doesn’t feel like they were a part of that,” Brown said. If the community had been included earlier on, Brown speculated that another, more environmentally friendly lessee could have been identified for the space.
Athens County Job and Family Services
Athens County Job and Family Services, overseen by the Athens County Commissioners, owes millions to the state of Ohio. The agency’s former director, Jean Demosky, faces felony charges in the Athens County Court of Common Pleas over alleged mismanagement of county funds. Demosky has a final pretrial hearing in her criminal case scheduled for Oct. 19.
Brown said she would leverage her knowledge of county budgets from her work at the Board of Developmental Disabilities to help JFS move forward.
“It sounds like there’s a plan to repay the money, and so that is a good start. But what that means is that there will be some limited resources for the next several years that will impact the supports that people need and that they should be getting,” Brown said.
“It’s so important that we assess what resources and funding we have coming in, what the payment that’s going to have to happen each year, what that impact is,” Brown added. “I am super focused on figuring out what other counties are doing that has helped how we can maximize the resources we have in Athens County.”
She said it is the responsibility of the county commission to ensure that JFS follows all state and federal laws. “We really have to know as a board what JFS should and should not be doing,” she said.
Smith said she believes the county should have had stronger oversight of JFS and brought issues at the agency into the public view sooner.
“The JFS issue, as my understanding, was an issue long before it came to light, and it’s unfair to the people of Athens County that we’re on the hook … for something that probably could have been avoided,” Smith said. “I think that we need to make sure we have the right leadership in place, and that we’re not appointing people to positions that they aren’t necessarily fit for.”
“I’m not saying we need to micromanage, but I also think that when things are brought to light, they need to be made a discussion of and not necessarily left under the rug trying to protect ourselves,” she added.
