The chair gaveled the regular meeting of the White County Board of Commissioners to order at 6:01 p.m. on June 24, 2025. The agenda, posted to the County’s government website seventy-two hours earlier in compliance with Georgia’s open-meetings law, ran to forty-seven pages. Item 9(b) was a routine reauthorization of a noise-ordinance variance for the Helen downtown glockenspiel. The variance had been reauthorized, without debate, in each of the preceding eleven Junes.

The June 2025 meeting adjourned at 8:09 a.m. the following morning.

Item 9(b) accounted for fourteen hours and four minutes of that meeting. The remaining four minutes were the chair’s opening remarks and the procedural close.

What follows is a reconstruction of how that happened, drawn from the certified meeting minutes (linked at the top of this article), from the County’s archived audio (also linked), from the contemporaneous notes of three attendees who spoke with Bavarian Brainrot on the record, and from the FOIA-released Helen Welcome Center glockenspiel maintenance log that was, at the time, not yet known to be in commissioners’ hands.

It is, by any reasonable read of public-meeting history in this part of the state, the longest single-agenda-item Board meeting on record.

It is also, as one commissioner who spoke with Bavarian Brainrot on background put it, “a thing that should never have happened, that should have been a five-minute item, and that has now made decibels into a partisan question in this county.”

What Was On The Agenda

Item 9(b), as printed in the agenda packet (page 31), read in full as follows:

9(b). Reauthorization of City of Helen Noise Ordinance Variance, Chapter 8 §8.7(c) (Decorative Civic Chimes). Standing variance permits operation of the Helen Downtown Glockenspiel at sound-pressure levels exceeding the Chapter 8 §8.5 daytime ambient-noise cap of 65 dB(A) at the property line, on the half-hour and the hour, between 09:00 and 21:00 daily.

Action requested: Reauthorize for one (1) year, expiring June 30, 2026.

That was the entire item.

The variance had originally been granted in 2014, in the wake of the glockenspiel’s 2013 mechanical refurbishment, when the new chime mechanism’s sound-pressure output at the Bruckenstrasse property line was first measured at 78 dB(A). It had been routinely renewed in every subsequent year. The renewal vote in 2024 had taken, per the certified minutes of that meeting, three minutes and twelve seconds.

Page 8 of the 2025 agenda packet contained the staff memorandum supporting reauthorization. The memorandum was four sentences long. It noted that no formal noise complaints had been filed against the glockenspiel during the preceding twelve months, that the Welcome Center had completed routine maintenance on the chime mechanism in March 2025, and that the City of Helen Code Enforcement Officer had no objection to reauthorization.

It was, on its face, a procedural item.

What Was Not On The Agenda

What was not on the agenda — what was, in fact, sitting on the desk of Commissioner Anne-Marie Reinhardt, the District 2 commissioner who represents the Helen area, at the moment the chair gaveled the meeting to order — was a 137-page binder of materials that Commissioner Reinhardt had prepared over the preceding six weeks, with the assistance of a public-records-and-research consulting firm based in Cleveland, GA, that the commissioner had engaged through her District 2 constituent-service office at a billed cost, ultimately, of $4,200.

The binder contained the Helen Welcome Center glockenspiel maintenance log for the period 2018 through 2024 — a document that the commissioner had requested from the City of Helen under the Georgia Open Records Act in early May, and that the City had released to her on May 31. It contained a 41-page acoustic-modeling report, prepared by a Gainesville-based acoustical engineer at the commissioner’s instruction, projecting the glockenspiel’s sound-pressure profile at every property line within a 600-foot radius. It contained a comparative analysis of the noise ordinances of Gatlinburg, Tennessee; Leavenworth, Washington; and Frankenmuth, Michigan — the three other comparably-themed American towns whose civic-chime arrangements had been examined for benchmarking purposes. It contained eleven testimonials from Bruckenstrasse-adjacent residents.

It contained, in total, the case for reducing the variance ceiling from 78 dB(A) to 66 dB(A) — a 12-decibel reduction that would, in practical terms, render the glockenspiel’s chime audible from approximately 110 feet away rather than the current 480.

Commissioner Reinhardt had not, prior to the gavel, communicated any of this to the chair, to county staff, or to her four fellow commissioners. She had not requested an amendment to item 9(b). She had not, per the agenda-procedure rules adopted by the Board in 2019, given the seventy-two hours of advance notice that an amendment of this scope would, under those rules, have required.

She had, instead, brought the binder to the meeting.

What Happened Between 6:01 p.m. And 11:03 p.m.

The meeting moved through items 1 through 9(a) at the standard pace. The chair recognized Commissioner Reinhardt at 9:47 p.m. when item 9(b) was called.

What follows is a faithful summary of the next five hours and sixteen minutes, drawn from the certified meeting minutes (pages 19–27) and corroborated against the archived audio.

Commissioner Reinhardt moved to amend item 9(b) to reduce the variance ceiling from 78 dB(A) to 66 dB(A). The motion was seconded by Commissioner Holdsworth (District 4).

The chair ruled the motion procedurally out of order on the grounds that the substance of the amendment had not been the subject of the seventy-two-hour advance-notice provision. Commissioner Reinhardt appealed the ruling. The Board sustained the appeal, four to one, with the chair dissenting.

Commissioner Reinhardt then began her presentation of the binder.

The presentation lasted, per the audio archive, one hour and forty-one minutes. It included a slide-by-slide review of the acoustic-modeling report, a recitation of all eleven Bruckenstrasse testimonials, a comparative reading of the relevant Gatlinburg, Leavenworth, and Frankenmuth ordinance language, and — between 10:42 and 10:54 p.m. — a live demonstration of the difference between 78 dB(A) and 66 dB(A), conducted with a calibrated sound-pressure meter and a Bluetooth speaker that the commissioner had brought to the dais.

The chair, twice during the demonstration, asked the commissioner whether she could proceed without the speaker. She declined.

Public comment was opened at 11:03 p.m., on a four-to-one vote, with the chair again dissenting. Eighteen Bruckenstrasse-adjacent residents had remained in the meeting hall through the presentation. Each spoke. The longest comment, given by a 74-year-old resident of the Edelweiss Strasse condominiums whose unit faces the glockenspiel at a distance of 47 feet, ran nine minutes and was, per multiple attendees who spoke with Bavarian Brainrot, “devastating.”

The meeting recessed for fifteen minutes at 1:14 a.m. on June 25.

What Happened Between 1:29 a.m. And 8:09 a.m.

The meeting resumed at 1:29 a.m. Commissioner Pendleton (District 1), who had been silent through the presentation, took the microphone.

Commissioner Pendleton made the case for the existing 78 dB(A) ceiling.

He had, like Commissioner Reinhardt, prepared materials. He had, unlike Commissioner Reinhardt, distributed them to fellow commissioners earlier in the evening, during the recess that had followed the close of public comment. The Pendleton materials — a 92-page binder, also prepared with the assistance of a consulting firm, this one based in Atlanta, at a billed cost, per the commissioner’s subsequent disclosure to the County Ethics Office, of $6,800 — made the case that the glockenspiel’s 78 dB(A) sound-pressure output was the operational floor below which the chime was not, in practical visitor-economy terms, fulfilling its civic-marketing function.

He cited Helen Welcome Center visitor-survey data showing that 38% of arriving visitors in 2024 indicated that the chime was “noticeable” during their downtown visit. He projected, via the same Atlanta consulting firm’s economic-impact modeling, that a 12-decibel reduction would reduce that figure to 11%. He projected, in turn, that the implied loss of “chime-noticeability” would correspond to a $340,000 annual reduction in downtown retail receipts — a figure that he cautioned was “highly preliminary” but that was, he argued, the correct order of magnitude.

The Pendleton presentation lasted two hours and eight minutes.

Commissioner Reinhardt requested rebuttal time. The chair granted it. Commissioner Reinhardt rebutted for one hour and twelve minutes. Commissioner Pendleton requested sur-rebuttal. The chair, audibly, exhaled. Sur-rebuttal was granted. It lasted forty-one minutes.

The Board moved to vote at 6:47 a.m.

What The Vote Was

The certified minutes record the vote on the Reinhardt amendment as three to two: Commissioners Reinhardt, Holdsworth, and Voss voting to reduce the ceiling from 78 dB(A) to 66 dB(A); Commissioners Pendleton and the chair voting against. The amendment carried.

The Board then voted on item 9(b) as amended. The vote was four to one, with Commissioner Pendleton dissenting. The amended variance carried.

The Helen Downtown Glockenspiel’s noise-ordinance variance ceiling has been, since the morning of June 25, 2025, 66 dB(A).

The chime mechanism, however, has not been mechanically modified. The Helen Welcome Center has not received a budgeted appropriation for the modification. The City of Helen Code Enforcement Officer, contacted by Bavarian Brainrot at the office of the City Manager on Tuesday, declined to comment on whether the glockenspiel is, as currently operated, in compliance with the amended variance.

Bavarian Brainrot conducted its own measurement at the Bruckenstrasse property line on Wednesday at 12:00 noon. The reading, taken with a calibrated Type 2 sound-pressure meter, was 78 dB(A).

What Comes Next

Commissioner Reinhardt has, per her District 2 office, requested that item 9(b) be re-noticed for the regular June 2026 meeting. The agenda for that meeting will be posted approximately seventy-two hours in advance.

The Helen Welcome Center has, in the period since the June 24 vote, conducted no public review of the chime mechanism’s sound-pressure profile. The Welcome Center’s 2026 operating budget, posted on the City of Helen website in March, does not contain a line item for chime modification.

Commissioner Pendleton, in a brief comment to Bavarian Brainrot on Tuesday afternoon at the entrance to the County Government Center parking lot, characterized the matter as “settled, in spirit if not in fact.” He declined to elaborate.

Commissioner Reinhardt did not respond to multiple Bavarian Brainrot requests for comment.

The chair, contacted at his Cleveland law office, returned a brief comment by email Wednesday morning. It read in full: “The meeting in June was long. The Board’s position on the matter is reflected in the certified minutes. I do not have anything further to add.”

The Helen Downtown Glockenspiel will chime next at 12:00 noon, today.

The Bavarian Brainrot newsroom will be at the property line.