Mixed Messages: When Regina Quick and Spencer Frye beat state Reps. Doug McKillip and Keith Heard in July, City Hall insiders hoped it might add to a new era of peace and tranquility between Athens-Clarke County and our overlords in Atlanta.

All five members of our local legislative delegation come January—Quick, Frye, Rep. Chuck Williams, R-Watkinsville, and Sens. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, and Frank Ginn, R-Danielsville—are on record as favoring the redistricting plan the county commission approved last year but McKillip (and maybe Heard) blocked. If you'll recall, the newly minted Republican McKillip wanted to prove his conservative bona fides by carving a GOP-leaning commission district out of liberal Athens, while Heard and McKillip both felt that the superdistricts in our eight-and-two system underrepresented minorities. Eventually, the frustrated Williams, Ginn and Cowsert, stymied by the delegation's unanimity rule for local legislation, let through a map with 10 equal districts, to the displeasure of local elected officials.

Frank Ginn

With Heard and McKillip gone, it ought to be a piece of cake to get the districts changed back for 2014, right? Not so fast. Commissioners asked at a work session last month and couldn't get a firm answer.

"Would you consider putting it to the voters in the county, which way they want to go?" Ginn said.

The referendum idea was a non-starter, since there isn't another election scheduled in Athens until July 2014. Ginn backed down on the referendum but didn't commit to pushing the issue at the Capitol. "I want to work with you," he told commissioners. "I think all our current delegation wants to support you in the direction you want to go."

Nor would lawmakers commit to reuniting Oconee County in one House district, the way it was before McKillip swapped out part of his Democratic Athens district for Williams' Republican one. Williams said "there's a pretty strong argument" for changing those districts back, but it's probably only possible as part of another statewide redistricting, not a standalone bill. "I haven't seen any indication there's an appetite to do that," he said.

Commissioners and Municipal Court Judge Leslie Spornberger Jones also asked lawmakers to revamp traffic laws, downgrading some penalties from possible jail time to fines only and giving local police the power to use radar to enforce speed limits.

"Probably the major complaint as far as neighborhood traffic is speeding," Commissioner Andy Herod said. "We don't really have a good mechanism to address that."

Quick's response was equivocal but at least promising: "I will not look at you and agree blindly... but I will examine all these things." That's more than commissioners could have hoped for in the past.

Broun Rowndup: Apparently, Republicans talking about how the Earth isn't 4.5 billion years old is the new Republicans talking about rape. Sen. Marco Rubio, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, was the laughingstock of the Internet last week after he told GQ that he isn't sure how old the Earth is because he's "not a scientist, man." Rubio also revealed that he's an Afrika Bambaataa fan; regrettably, GQ didn't follow up with a question about the age of Planet Rock.

And the votes for Charles Darwin keep trickling in. In addition to nearly 4,000 in Clarke County, he got more than 900 write-ins against Broun in Oconee County, and Oglethorpe County Democrat Laura Floyd reports he won 190 votes there.

Media Matters: Morris Communications' flagship newspaper, the Augusta Chronicle, went behind a paywall last year, and the Savannah Morning News recently followed suit. Word is you'll have to pay to read the Athens Banner-Herald online, too, by the end of the year. In hindsight, print publications should have charged for their online content from the beginning, but paywalls are so easily bypassed and people are so used to things being free on the web now that the jury's still out on whether they work. The real question is, how much in the ABH is worth paying to read anymore?

The Red & Black—where students revolted earlier this year after its nonprofit board tried to take away their editorial control—has four new board members: Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein, freelance editor Chuck Reece, New York Times reporter Justin Gilllis and Barron's editor Steven Sears. At least two, Bluestein and Reece, are Red & Black alumni and opposed the board's plan to make money by watering down its content. Four talented working journalists joining the board should help the organization get moving in the right direction and avoid any more ill-advised schemes.