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Industrial Authority already met; what about open meetings law? @ VLCIA 2013-03-08


Wanting to go to the Industrial Authority meeting tonight?
Oops, you missed it: they held it 11 days ago.
Did you want to speak there?
Nope, no Citizens to be Heard on that agenda, and not much else, either.

To find that agenda on VLCIA’s website:
Home → About Us → Industrial Authority →
Meeting Schedule,

There will be a Special Called Meeting of the Valdosta-Lowndes
County Industrial Authority on

Friday, March 8, 2013, 11:00 am at
the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority Offices. This
Special Called Meeting will also serve as the Regular March 2013
Meeting.


Agenda (PDF) There will be no meeting on Tuesday, March 19, 2013.

I don’t know when they put that on their website, but they announced
the same thing on

their facebook page on March 4th.
Much of the usual agenda boilerplate
is replaced by an executive session, and the agenda doesn’t
even say for what.
I seem to recall the Industrial Authority’s attorney on several occasions
reminding the Chair that before going into executive session it was
necessary to say for what purpose.
As the

Association of County Commissioners of Georgia (ACCG)
puts it:

What is the procedure for going into and holding an “executive session” or “closing a meeting”?

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South Ga. officials expecting sinkholes after rain while NYTimes plays down the risk



Sinkholes aren’t just
for Florida anymore: Albany’s got them.
Are sinkholes risky?
You may think so if one is under your house.
And here above the Floridan Aquifer you probably won’t know that
until your foundations starts cracking.
Maybe we should do something to prevent the problem,
and to help people who are affected by it.
Perhaps the Lowndes County government till pay attention when
somebody’s house falls into a sinkhole.

Jim Wallace wrote for WALB 9 March 2013,

Expect more sinkholes,

Some sinkholes have opened up in South Georgia since the recent
heavy rains.

And engineers and public works experts say they expect more
sinkholes to develop in the coming weeks. It’s just nature at work,
but it can really cause some problems.

Really?
Does “nature at work” include

sinkholes predictably forming after
massive water pumping to sprinkle strawberries during a cold snap?

The WALB story pooh-poohs the possibility of anything like that Sefner
sinkhole showing up in south Georgia, and then details two Albany sinkholes:

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$1.88 billion and more on Kemper Coal to be charged to Mississippi Power customers



Risks at

Southern Company’s Kemper Coal plant in Mississippi?
Push those costs onto the public, of course!
Southern Company and its subsidiary Mississippi Power
got the MS Public Service Commissioners to approve super-CWIP
(Construction Work in Progress)
for Kemper Coal: automatic rate increases for MS Power customers for years.
Just like Southern Company and its biggest subsidiary Georgia Power
got the Georgia legislature to approve Super-CWIP for the new nukes
at Plant Vogtle back in 2009.
And both CWIP projects are already over budget.
How about we cancel those boondoggles and build solar and wind instead?

AP reported 13 December 2012,

After spending $1.88 billion, Southern Co. still faces risks on plant in Kemper County,

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David defeats Goliath: Calvert Cliffs 3 nuke license denied, first ever by NRC



David (tiny five-person activist group NIRS with no lawyer)
defeated Goliath (the world’s biggest nuclear reactor manufacturer, Areva, and operator, EDF).
Previously

a committee terminated the licensing process
but the proposed operator wanted NRC review for the Calvert Cliffs 3
nuclear reactor.
For the first time ever, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied
a nuclear license, closing the book on Calvert Cliffs 3 for good,
and probably taking down
with it half a dozen or more other proposed reactors.

ENENEWS posted a roundup 12 March 2013,

NIRS: Victory! License denied for U.S. nuclear reactor — First time in history NRC has upheld denial

Who is this proposed nuclear operator?
The

NIRS press release explains:

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Suwannee County sinkholes —WCTV



Sinkholes in

Seffner, Fort Myers,
Tallahassee,
and now even closer.
Follow the Withlacoochee River south to the Suwannee River,
and two counties south of us in Suwannee County, Florida,
they’ve got dozens of sinkholes,

one of them massive, with another one this month,
including apparently a cavern under some yards.
This is in the same Floridan Aquifer that underlies Lowndes County,
where we had

a road drop into a sinkhole three years ago
and sinkholes were discovered under a man’s garage and yard last year.

Greg Gullberg 4 March 2013,

The Science Behind Sinkholes,

Mikell Cook says he and his neighbors have learned more about
Geology than they ever cared to since last summer when Tropical
Storm Debby swept through much of Florida leaving Live Oak and
surrounding areas peppered with sinkholes.

He and his neighbors live in the town of McAlpin, where

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Tallahassee sinkhole

Even closer than
Tampa Bay
or
Fort Myers,
Tallahassee has sinkhole problems in our same Floridan Aquifer
just across the state line.
Will the Lowndes County Commission do anything about our sinkhole
problems before people start losing their insurance and get sucked
into holes in the ground?

Andy Alcock wrote for WCTV Wednesday,

Tallahassee Woman Faces Sinkhole Problem,


Imagine living in a home you can’t insure, no one wants to buy and
it may not be safe.

A Tallahassee woman is currently facing that problem.

At first glance, her home in Tallahassee’s Mission Manor
neighborhood on the city’s northwest side doesn’t look much
different from any of the other homes in the neighborhood.

Then about two years ago, homeowner Vickie Gordon found a problem.

“I started noticing that the doors were getting stuck in the
bathroom, couldn’t open them,” said Gordon.

Then the issues became more noticeable.

Cracks started showing up all over the house.

After Gordon contacted her insurance company, investigators found
sinkhole activity at her home.

I wish this part was a joke:

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Valdosta Vimeo

I've been nagging Valdosta for years about putting some of their
cable TV station content on the web.
Turns out they are already doing some of that,
which is a step towards acting like a modern metropolitan area.
Received Wednesday via Tim Carroll;
I added the links and the [clarification].



From: Sementha Mathews

Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 11:48 AM

To: Tim Carroll

Subject: RE: "The rest of the story"

Councilman Carroll,

Thank you for the recent phone call. As a result, I will research
the Austin, Tx media practices to see if they can be implemented in
any way here at Metro 17. We used to include a council wrap segment
in each show, and I'll ask

Shemeeka [Johnson, Valdosta Channel 17 Media Coordinator]
why we took that out. But we
can easily add that back in.

City of Austin posts

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Leon County Florida trouble ticket system


Report a Problem or Request a Service
Why do citizens have to nag our local governments to find out what's
going on even about

cleaning up sewage all over their back yards and under their houses?
How about if our governments deploy issue tracking systems?
Here's an example of how that works.

As previously mentioned,
Leon County, Florida, lets anyone

Report a Problem or Request a Service
through their web page.

Find My Service Request
Then you can

find your service request
and

track a problem
using a ticket number.

This is not rocket science.
Thousands of businesses have been using such issue tracking systems
(also known as trouble ticket systems) for many years.
There is off-the-shelf software to implement them.
Beyond the obvious advantages to the citizens of being able to
tell what's going on with their issues, such systems also
greatly aid local governments by

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More Valdosta wastewater correspondence



Some interesting questions have come up in
Gabe Fisher's continuing correspondence with the City of Valdosta
about

sewage in his back yard
and

under his house,
while

City Council Tim Carroll continues to respond,
both copying a long list of people.

From: Gabe Fisher

Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2013 14:23:12 -0500

All, I appreciate the update on where the city stands on moving the
sewer all together—I just wish we had been kept informed of
the plans over the last 4 years. Living with the *real* threat of
flooding is stressful enough, add in the guaranteed associated
sewage spill is more than I can handle.

I also appreciate the city workers spreading lime and working on the
sewer line behind my house today. But I have questions—What
about the sewage in my yard and under my house? Is this my
responsibility?

Thanks, Gabe

Tim Carroll responded with a couple of suggestions:

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Videos: Two rezonings and a lease @ LCC 2013-03-11



A surprising number of questions were asked by Commissioners
at yesterday morning’s Work Session, yet still nobody asked
about the well near

one of the proposed rezonings.
We had a microphone failure during the first few items;
sound picks up as the Commissioners start asking questions on

5.b. REZ-2013-04.
Because of the sound glitch
you can’t tell that for sure from the videos that nobody discussed SPLOST,
but Gretchen was there from call to order to adjournment, and she didn’t hear anything about
SPLOST.
Maybe they’ll say something about it tonight at their 5:30 PM Regular Session,
at which they vote on these rezonings and contract.

Here’s

the agenda with links to the videos and some notes.

LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS

PROPOSED AGENDA

WORK SESSION, MONDAY, MARCH 11, 2013, 8:30 a.m.

REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, MARCH 12, 2013, 5:30 p.m.

327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor

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