Regular monthly meeting of the Valdosta City Council (VCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 7 April 2011,
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
Adjournment!
Little joke there.
But adjournment is not the end of interacting with the city government at a city council meeting.
For example,
Council Deidra White stopped on the steps of City Hall
to talk to people.
Three people were there.
All of us lived in the county outside Valdosta.
Not a single person who lives in Valdosta stayed
to talk to her.
Among other things, she said she thought she made clear at the end of
the last Council meeting that the mayor didn’t speak for her.
That was at the end of the meeting, in the
“Council Comments” item on the agenda.
However, apparently nobody stayed to hear that, either.
The 75% pot of T-SPLOST funds is what the project lists recently
submitted by Lowndes County
and the City of Valdosta are about,
according to
Corey Hull, continuing his presentation on T-SPLOST at the Lowndes County
Democratic Party (LCDP) meeting.
Those are projects of regional significance
that the local jurisdictions want the voters to actually
vote on that project.
The other 25% goes to local jurisdictions, like this:
Corey Hull of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Metropolitan Planning Organization (VLMPO)
explains T-SPLOST (HB 277) and the Transportation Investment Act of 2010
at the monthly meeting of the Lowndes County Democratic Party (LCDP),
Gretchen Quarterman (Chair), Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia.
Video by John S. Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
The plan identifies
$35 billion to meet the needs in Georgia today.
However, $72 billion are needed to meet the transportation
needs to sustain Georgia’s economy into the future.
Of course, that’s according to the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT),
which notoriously is not interested in trains or other mass transit:
if it’s not a road or a road bridge, forget it.
Continuing:
And $1 billion is needed here in Lowndes County.
Lowndes County’s transportation plan through the
Metropolitan Planning Organization
has about a billion dollars in projects.
After last night’s Valdosta City Council meeting,
someone told me he thought all renewable energy sources
required subsidies, and that was the problem.
Well, I think the real problem is the much larger
subsidies to big oil.
Despite astronomical profits during what have been lean years for
most everyone else, the oil and gas industry continues to benefit from
massive, multi-billion dollar taxpayer subsidies. Opinion polling shows
the American public overwhelmingly wants those subsidies eliminated.
That’s at least $4 billion a year to big oil while Congress debates cutting
Social Security and Medicare and maybe shutting down the government.
According to the American Petroleum Institute (API),
Continue reading →
Legalization of drugs in Mexico would not only lead to lowered violence
and drug consumption but also boost its economy, former Mexican President
Vicente Fox said Wednesday during a speech to a convention of newspaper
editors from the United States and Latin America.
“Things are going very badly for Mexico with the issues of organized
crime and violence,” Fox said in Spanish. “We’re losing large
volumes of tourists, if not in the interior, then at the border. We’re
losing a great number of investments.”
And if there were more jobs in Mexico, from tourism and investments,
there would be fewer Mexicans trying to sneak into the U.S. for jobs.
Will legalization cause more drug use? No:
On Wednesday, Fox cited the example of Portugal, where he said drugs
use has fallen by 25 percent a decade after they were legalized there.
So what’s the evidence that these
biomass opponents are many, as the VDT says?
We could review letters to the editors in the VDT,
but let’s look at the visual evidence LAKE has recorded.
With no pro-biomass demonstrators anywhere to be seen.
Sure, a few people show up at government meetings to speak for the
biomass plant, but by my tally they are indeed very few,
and most of them are either former employees or board members
of the Industrial Authority.
Yes, LAKE has posted videos of
them, as well:
Ken Garren,
Nolen Cox.
Crawford Powell.
Or watch the people at the microphones during the
6 December 2011 VLCIA biomass “forum”
and see what you think the ratio is.
“THUMBS DOWN: To area officials who continue to refer
to the opponents of the biomass plant as a “fringe” group.
Far more citizens are concerned about the plant
than officials would like for the
public to believe. Thankfully, the city council allowed them to speak
at Thursday’s meeting, but the issue is not going away until their
health concerns are addressed.”
A year ago the VDT was solidly in the pro biomass camp.
Guess they didn’t like being fed misinformation,
any more than the rest of us did.
And that was before the VDT said
VLCIA illegally made up a document.
The big winner in the crackdown on the illegal immiggration
has been the private prison industry.
As Bloomberg Business Week reports in its latest issue,
companies such as Corrections Corporation of America
are making millions.
In fact, CCA makes more money from detaining immigrants
than it does from any single U.S. state.
She goes on to mention CCA’s stock price has gone up by
a factor of ten since 9/11.
Bloomberg’s Betty Liu reports, 18 March 2011. (Source: Bloomberg)
The source of the money CCA and its investors and executives are making?
Our tax dollars!
What about county voters, and what about the combined budget?
Q: “What is the county’s view on consolidation?”
A: CUEE Chairman Leroy Butler answered:
“We did no poll of individuals in the county,
so we don’t have any; anything we say would be speculation.”
Remember,
only one of CUEE’s board is from the county outside the City of Valdosta,
and nobody outside Valdosta gets to vote in the referendum.
They don’t know what the county thinks, and they don’t care,
because legally they don’t have to:
if Valdosta votes to give up their school system, the Lowndes County
school board has no choice but to pick up the pieces.
Kick-off meeting, Community Unification for Educational Excellence, Inc., CUEE.
They’re for consolidation of the Valdosta and Lowndes County School Systems.
Videos by John S. Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
http://lake.typepad.com/on-the-lake-front/cuee/
