Roughly two dozen people attended a town hall meeting earlier this week at the City Annex, where the topic was a proposed under-16 curfew.
The City Annex is the 107-year-old building located to the left of City Hall. It serves as extra space for both the public library and the Milledgeville city government.
Attempting to read the tea leaves, the curfew appears to have the votes to pass. Mayor Pro-Tem Denese Shinholster led the meeting and touted the benefits of the curfew.
“Parents need to be responsible for their kids,” she said.
Councilwomen Collinda Lee and Shonya Mapp also spoke at the meeting and generally seemed in favor of the idea.
Then, there are the three new City Council members – Morgan Pendergast, Arlene Simmons and Jeff Wells.
“I’m very conflicted on this myself,” said Wells. “I have not made a final decision of how I would vote.”
Pendergast and Simmons didn’t state their position during the town hall meeting, but each raised their concerns at a previous City Council meeting, making references to “stop and frisk.”
Finally, there’s Mayor Mary Parham Copelan, who theoretically would be the tie-breaking vote. The mayor has championed the curfew for the last month. Parham-Copelan appears to have more confidence in the Milledgeville Police Department than Pendergast and Simmons.
“I couldn’t give them more props,” the mayor said. (The Milledgeville Police Department) stands out at the top.”
The City Council has twice tabled a vote on the ordinance, instead opting to host several townhall meetings. If ultimately approved, children under the age of 16 would be prohibited from being out in public past 11 p.m. on weekdays and past midnight on weekends. The idea also is to hold parents more accountable. A first curfew violation would result in a warning to the child’s parent or legal guardian, while subsequent violations would result in a $500 fine.
Linc Boyer, the MPD’s patrol major, spoke at the meeting, telling those in attendance that a curfew “is not going to change our actions or who we get out with and how we do our job.”
“This ordinance gives us more teeth to hold the parents accountable,” he said.
County Commissioner Emily Davis also attended the meeting, saying that she supported the curfew and planned on presenting something similar to her fellow county commissioners. Cyndee Edwards, the local NAACP president, sat next to Davis, although Edwards did not speak at the townhall meeting.