The Georgia legislature overwhelmingly passed a rather brief
bill that changes
the requirements for Comprehensive Plans by local governments.
ACCG
and
GMA both supported it.
It seems to be related to recent
Department of Community Affairs (DCA)
rulemaking that was mostly positive.
Does that make it a good law?
Opinions seem to differ.
Here’s what I’ve found.
Author Archives: John S. Quarterman
Who’s inaccurate: VDT, Valdosta, GEFA, Chamber, County?
Both Chamber of Commerce Chair Myrna Ballard and Lowndes County Manager
Joe Pritchard say the VDT is inaccurate.
The VDT took offense at Ballard’s assertion.
Which do you believe?
I believe I’d like to see the evidence, not just the VDT’s assertions.
And this junior high school cat fight the VDT insists on is not
helping fix the real problem with water and wastewater in Valdosta
and Lowndes County: the widespread and longterm damage to our watersheds
that turned a normal rain in 2009 into a 700 year flood, and caused
another flooding of the Withlacoochee Wasterwater Treatment Plant this year.
I’m all for investigative reporting, but I have not yet once seen
the VDT investigate the real underlying issues of longtime clearcutting
and building of roads subdivisions, and parking lots without adequate
consideration of water flows.
The VDT front page today has yet another story attacking the City of Valdosta, Loan info from GEFA contradicts City: $11 million awaits disbursement, loan amounts don’t match. I can’t make much sense out of it, because while Jason Shaefer has dug up a lot of interesting information, he doesn’t include dates for much of the financial detail he attributes to GEFA. Let’s see the VDT publish the documents they are referring to. The city does publish its Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports. The VDT has a website, and could publish whatever records it got from GEFA, which after all were produced using our tax dollars, and are therefore public records. Or if the documents are somewhere on GEFA’s website, the VDT could publish links to the specific documents. The VDT did publish a timeline of correspondence with the City about loans, so it could just as easily publish the GEFA documents and its own page-by-page and chart-by-chart comparison so we could all see for ourselves.
The VDT prepended this blurb to its timeline:
It has come to the attention of the Times that the Chamber of Commerce has called a special meeting on Tuesday to address what COC Pres. Myrna Ballard terms as “damage to our community’s reputation” due to the stories that have appeared in the newspaper. The invitation for the 9 a.m. meeting at the Chamber office was extended to only a select group of Chamber members, no media, and states that Mayor John Gayle and City Manager Larry Hanson will explain the city’s financial status. The Times takes very seriously the implication that the newspaper has written anything that is “inaccurate,” as stated by the Chamber. As such, the Times has chosen to show the public the information provided to the newspaper in response to questions posed to the City, with no editing, to allow citizens the opportunity to see for themselves if what the Times has written is an “inaccurate” portrayal of the city’s financial status.
What was that again?
The Times takes very seriously the implication that the newspaper has written anything that is “inaccurate,” as stated by the Chamber.
How about as stated by Lowndes County Manager Joe Pritchard? In a letter from him to me of 29 January 2013 Pritchard stated:
Continue readingActivists Grill NRC on San Onofre Restart
Ecological Options Network (EON) posted video of public comments at the latest Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) meeting about restarting San Onofre 2, where documents indicate Southern California Edison knew the new steam generators were defective years before they even installed them.
EON noted:In these video excerpts from the 4-3-2013 NRC webcast, informed activists hammer the NRC staff and SoCal Edison reps with penetrating comments and questions about apparently collusive fast-track plans to restart one of San Onofre’s broken reactors—in a tsunami and earthquake zone, in the middle of a strategic U.S. military base, in a surrounding urban area with a population of 8.5 million people—a plant that is not cost-effective 99% of the time, operated by a utility with the worst safety record in the country.Activists just helped convince NRC to deny a license for Calvert Cliffs 3 in Maryland, and Continue readingWhat could possibly go wrong?
Participants include Ace Hoffman, David Freeman, Kendra Ulrich, Dan Hirsch, John Geesman, Ray Lutz, Gary Headrick and Myla Reson.
Road abandonment, deannexation, and a mysterious special presentation @ LCC 2013-04-08
The Lowndes County Commission is holding a Special Presentation;
apparently so special they don’t say what it is.
Come see for yourself Monday morning at 8:30 or Tuesday evening at 5:30,
whichever meeting they’re going to have the Special Presentation;
the agenda doesn’t say that, either.
And see what they do about an abandonment of a road and
a deannexation request.
Here’s the agenda.
LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION, MONDAY, APRIL 8, 2013, 8:30 a.m.
REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 2013, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor
- Call to Order
- Invocation
- Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag
- Special Presentation
- Minutes for Approval
- Work Session — March 25, 2013
- Regular Session — March 26, 2013
- For Consideration
- Abandonment of Log Road (CR 8)
- Deannexation Request, Houser, 2990 Stallings Rd, 148-58A, ~36 acres, R-15 (City)
- Bid — Six Month Fuel Contract
- Reports-County Manager
- Citizens Wishing to be Heard Please State Name And Address
-jsq
Alcohol, drugs, and broken nuke equipment
A broken cooling water pump at Fermi 2 yesterday plus
60% lost safety data today.
Airflow and quality problems at Kewaunee and Three Mile Island.
Drugs at Saint Lucie in Florida
and alcohol at Nine Mile Point 1 in New York and
at Braidwood in Illinois.
And four workers injured at Callaway in Missouri.
Apparently nuke employees can get terminated for off-site
recreational drug use, but not for fires or broken equipment.
We’ve already seen the event about fire at Plant Vogtle. Here are more events in the NRC Current Event Notification Report for April 4, 2013 and also today, April 5, 2013,
Continue readingFire at Plant Vogtle
Does a
Nuclear Operations Unusual Event (NOUE) give you a warm and fuzzy feeling?
When it’s a fire at a nuke on the Savannah River?
They didn’t shut Unit 1 down for that,
but Unit 2 has been down for almost a month.
NRC Current Event Notification Report for April 4, 2013,
Continue readingNOTIFICATION OF UNUSUAL EVENT BASED ON A FIRE IN THE PROTECTED AREA LASTING GREATER THAN 15 MINUTES
“Vogtle Unit 1 has declared an NOUE based on a fire within the protected area boundary not extinguished within 15 minutes of detection.
“At 0632 [EDT] Unit 1 received a fire alarm in the Unit 1 control building. A systems operator was dispatched to investigate and reported back that a small flame was visible inside 1ND3I1, computer inverter. Fire brigade was dispatched in accordance with fire response procedures. No other systems or parameters affected.
Arkansas tar sands oil spill
Will Exxon clean all these tar sands oil spills like BP “cleaned up” the Gulf? Meanwhile, a solar spill is called a nice day.
June 2013, pipeline ruptured in
Alberta:
250,000 gallons spilled into the Red Deer River.
27 March 2013, train derailment in Minnesota: 15,000 gallons spilled.
“Only about 1,000 gallons has been recovered,” said Dan Olson, spokesman for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. “The remaining oil on the ground has thickened into a heavy tar-like consistency.”
30 March 2013, pipleline rupture, Mayflower, Arkansas: “thousands of gallons” spilled.
Kimberly Brasington, an Exxon spokeswoman, confirmed the oil from the ruptured Pegasus pipeline originated in Canada. The oil is “Wabasca Heavy Crude from Western Canada,” she said in an e-mail Sunday. Canadian group CrudeMonitor describes Wabasca as a blend of heavy oil production from the Athabasca region.
Aerial footage of the Arkansas crude seeping through woods, waterways, streets, and yards:
Continue readingUtilities levy an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens –Adam Smith
What’s next door to Georgia Power, also a Southern Company, and raising rates on customers who are using less electricity? Alabama Power.
Rebecca Smith wrote for WSJ 21 March 2013, Return Rates for Utilities Get Harder Look
Households getting electricity from Alabama Power Co. are using 6% less than five years ago. But their monthly power bills still have increased by an average of 8%, partly because of a lucrative rate agreement that the utility brokered with state regulators 30 years ago.
“an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens”
—Adam SmithThe deal allows Alabama Power, the state’s largest electric utility, to adjust its rates annually to maintain a return on equity, a measure of profit, of 13% to 14.5%. Now it is coming under fire from consumer advocates and one state utility commissioner, who argue that the utility’s profit levels are too high.
Continue reading
VDT on Foxborough v. McDonalds
It looks like the strategy I recommended
to the Foxborough opponents to McDonalds worked:
go to the County Commission work session and you may get in the newspaper.
Kay Harris writes in the VDT about
Issues with development,
Neighborhood upset about commercial encroachment:
According to Vince Schneider, the spokesman for the residents, the majority of the neighborhood is opposed to the possibility of a McDonald’s restaurant openin g there. The property is currently listed with Lowndes County as owned by First State Bank, but the county engineer, Mike Fletcher, confirmed Monday at the Lo wndes County Board of Commissioners work session that he has received a plat fo r the proposed development.Many of the residents only found out aboout the proposed McDonalds from a cryptic mention by Kay Harris in the VDT a few weeks ago. Naturally, the VDT ends the current story on a note of finality: Continue readingSchneider appeared before commissioners at the work session to request they rec onsider the commercial zoning in the area.