Community efforts underway to provide new Nativity for town

Using a track-hoe, county employees tackle the mound of mattresses  discarded next door to the Thrift Store when it is closed. The county says this situation must be brought under control, while the Thrift Store founder says it’s illegal dumping the county needs to address.

         A massive pile of discarded mattresses left beside the Community Thrift Store looks just as nasty as you think they would.

“Worse,” said Thrift Store founder Don Russell  of the mattresses that number somewhere between 200 and 400 in a mound on an empty lot on Samaritan Drive.

The mound was slowly eroding with the county employees using a track hoe to load the soggy mattresses one at a time into dumpsters and a county dump truck for removal to the Whitestone inert landfill, all at taxpayers’ expense.

        See full story in this week's print or online editions. 

     Recently updated data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) shows that per capita personal income in Pickens County grew by 4.35 percent from 2017, to $47,887 in 2018.

Per capita personal income is personal income divided by population and residents here saw their incomes grow by almost $2,000 in 2018 over the previous year. Ten years earlier, in 2008, Pickens County’s per capita income was $35,008.  

     Pickens’ $47,887 per capita personal income figure  leads our 15-county Northwest Georgia region. Murray County is the lowest in the region at $29,968.

Pickens Sheriff Book in photo of Vinh Bao Chau.

Press Release from

U.S. Attorney’s Public Affairs Office

GAINESVILLE, Ga. - Vinh Bao Chau, 23, of Jasper, has been sentenced for communicating a bomb threat to a church preschool, cyberstalking of a woman who refused to date him, and interstate communication of a threat.

  Chau was arrested in March of 2017 at his home on Matthews Road in Jasper after calling a bomb threat to the preschool of the Jasper First Baptist.

The Progress reported at that time that when law enforcement identified Chau for the preschool threat, they found the  2015 Pickens High School graduate already had a warrant for terroristic threats in Gordon County.

See full story in this week's print or online editions. 

        A tax dispute that stretches back eight years was settled in mediation November 14, with the total cost to the county exceeding $160,000 for legal fees and other costs.

The settlement is the culmination of years of back-and-forth between property owners Jack and Annette Williams and the Pickens County Tax Assessor’s Office. The Williamses, who own a large home on Firetower Road, have filed appeals on their property value every year since 2011.