Meet Carol.

Carol Myers is the local county commissioner for District 8. She’s been in office for 4 years and served as mayor pro tem in 2022. Carol’s activism has its origins in her college years when she joined protests against nuclear power and the arms race and interned with Ralph Nader’s New York Public Interest Group teaching elementary kids about solar energy and then spent a year at Arcosanti in Arizona, helping build an architectural experiment passive solar city.

Carol came to Athens in  1984 and has lived in District 8 for 30 years.  She  raised two daughters, who went to Athens Montessori and Athens-Clarke County public schools, and spent her career teaching and being an administrator at Athens Technical College. Over her almost 30 years there, she taught multiple thousands of students, many of them first-time college students and adults transitioning to different work fields. From them, she learned about the struggles and successes of a diverse cross-section of Athens and northeast Georgia. Her students’ life experiences are a prime motivator of the work she does in City Hall.

Motivated by the slogan “think globally, act locally,” she originally worked locally on reproductive health issues when she came to Athens and then moved on to working in election campaigns for local progressives starting in the late 90s. She got her first taste of working in local government when she worked on the 2005 SPLOST advisory committee. She subsequently chaired the SPLOST 2005 Oversight Committee and then served again on the project selection committee for SPLOST 2011.

A longtime avid cyclist, Carol decided to mark her retirement in 2015 with a bike ride across the country from Washington to Maine along the Northern Tier. Upon her return, Carol focused more on her passion for renewable energy and alternative transportation, getting more active in local groups. Mayor Nancy Denson asked her to serve on a bike-pedestrian citizen group that created the Athens in Motion plan and commission, for which she served as its first chair.

During the same period, she became a team member of 100% Clean and Renewable Energy in Athens, a grassroots campaign for a just and equitable transition. In 2019, they lobbied the commission to unanimously pass a resolution to commit ACC’s energy to come from clean and renewable sources by 2035. Simultaneously, they submitted clean energy projects to the 2020 SPLOST program, resulting in a $15.8 million Renewable Energy Project to help convert ACC to 100% green energy.

Since getting elected in 2020, Carol has kept up her commitment to the Greening of Athens – seeing through the passage of a new Complete Streets Policy and multiple government projects to address the 100% Clean Energy Resolution – and being a strong advocate for Eastside residents and businesses. When she’s not busy reading new agenda reports and meeting with constituents, Carol loves cycling, reading nonfiction, and playing with her grandchildren.