Maybe Lowndes County could also welcome tourists instead of using
them as a ticketing revenue stream
that’s costing us $200,000 to process.
And maybe both Lowndes County and Valdosta could put their

agenda packets online like tiny
(population 3,067) Tybee Island does.

Jim Galloway wrote for the AJC today,

Your daily jolt: Tybee Island nixes license plate surveillance,

Tybee Island has decided that the National Security Agency isn’t a model worth following. On Monday, The coastal city’s council retracted its approval of a pair of license plate scanners intended to greet tourists. From

the Savannah Morning News:

Citing mostly negative feedback from the public and concerns over how the information from the scanners would translate to a tourism study being conducted by a local professor, the council instead voted to purchase a higher quality model of the current hose-like vehicle counter the city has stretched over U.S. 80.

Meanwhile,
the Lowndes County Sheriff’s office last year was

looking forward to
getting an

Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR).
Traffic citations coming off of I-75 already cost us $130,492 to process in the Clerk of Court’s office
plus

$60,330 so far in software and hardware.

Tybee Island has

its agendas and council packets online
and even already has an online synopsis of yesterday’s meeting:

Click here to download Council packet PDF

Special City Council Synopsis 20131202

Mayor Buelterman called the special city council meeting to order at
3:30PM on December 2, 2013. Those present were Mayor pro tem Wanda
Doyle, Paul Wolff, Tom Groover, Jan Fox, Barry Brown and Bill
Garbett. Also attending were Diane Schleicher, City Manager; Robert
Bryson, Chief, Tybee Island Police Department and Janet LeViner,
Clerk of Council. Bubba Hughes, City Attorney and Tommy Branch,
Callaway, Braun, Riddle and Hughes, PC were not present.

I.

License Plate Readers.
Wanda Doyle

made a motion to rescind the
vote made by mayor and council on November 14, 2013 to purchase
License Plate Readers.

Paul Wolff

seconded. Vote was unanimous.

II.

Wanda Doyle

made a motion (1) to allow the city manager to
proceed to work with the Department of Transportation regarding the
permitting process for an embedded traffic counter; (2) to issue an
RPF and get three quotes for a more durable traffic counter than
what is currently being used; and (3) to check on the financing.

Paul Wolff

seconded the motion. Vote was unanimous.

Paul Wolff

made a motion to adjourn.

Tom Groover

seconded. Vote was unanimous.

Meeting adjourned at 3:40PM

That particular meeting doesn’t seem to have a council packet.
The meeting of 24 October 2013 has online

a 195 page PDF.
One big PDF lump isn’t the most accessible way to put an agenda packet online
(
other cities and counties link documents for individual items
into each item on the agenda, including the

Lowndes County Board of Education),
but it’s way better than what Valdosta and Lowndes County currently
put online for board packets, which is nothing.
So we don’t know what they didn’t talk about when they have a
four minute work session.


Sure, we can file an open records request and know for sure that
we won’t get the packet

until after they vote on it.

How come tiny little Tybee Island can do this and
mighty Valdosta and Lowndes County can’t? Or won’t.
Maybe they should go back to high school to learn how.

-jsq