Apparently
VLCIA
collects $3 million in tax revenues annually
and pays about $368,000 in staff salaries and benefits,
plus $125,000 in legal and accounting costs, as well as
other items in general operations.
This is according to VLCIA’s
Operating Budget (FYE 30 June 2011),
obtained by
open records request in February 2011,
and given to LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
Look for yourself;
here it is
in PDF and two different single-page forms.
-jsq
Continue readingFormer Lowndes County commissioner Richard Lee once told me “…the learning curve is very steep for first-time commissioners.” Our new county commissioners, Richard Raines and Crawford Powell, are living proof of the veracity of that statement. In case Bill O’Reilly is reading this, here’s a few examples.
Earlier this month a grant application for the purchase of 5,000 weather emergency radios was nixed by a 2 – 1 vote. The radios could’ve been a means for citizens residing in remote areas of the county to
The owl in Hahira:
Monthly LAKE MeetingThomas says:
When: 5:30-6:45 PM, Tuesday 1 March 2011
Updated meeting location
Where: home of Thomas Ieracitano
414 East Main Street, Hahira
229-251-2462
That’s on US 122, just east of the Masonic Lodge.
“Bring a lawn chair, laptop (I will have Mediacom wireless) and your own food and drink.”If it rains or there are too many bugs or something, we will move to:
Down Home Pizza
103 South Webb Street, Hahira
229-794-1888
Help cover food, water, transportation, incarceration, solar energy, biomass, and regular local government meetings: you never know when news will be made!
Popular topics lately on the LAKE blog, On the LAKE Front, include Continue reading
After all the
protesters, police, and press,
representatives of
VLCIA,
Sterling Planet,
Hannah Solar,
Georgia Power,
and the
City of Valdosta
did finally break ground for
the Wiregrass Solar power plant.
I asked Col. Ricketts for a shovel, but he just snorted.
Here’s the
groundbreaking video:
Elvis Costello reminds us this song was written by Nick Lowe in 1974,
What’s so funny about Peace Love & Understanding?
As I walk throughHere Costello sings it with Bob Dylan, Zooey Deschanel, and Jenny Lewis:
This wicked world
Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity.
I ask myself
Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred, and misery?
And each time I feel like this inside,
There’s one thing I wanna know:
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding?
-jsq
Continue readingEveryone wants jobs for those who need them and jobs for young people so they don’t have to go somewhere else to find one. But what good is that if those jobs suck up all the water those people need to drink?
At the Lake Park Chamber of Commerce annual dinner Brad Lofton gave a speech which I liked, and I told him so afterwards, because it was mostly about real industry with real jobs that that the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority (VLCIA) has brought into the area.
But it had a problem:
David Rodock writes in the VDT,
Report on funds spent by Industrial Authority during biomass conference:
An open records request led to the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority (VLCIA) publicly releasing the detailed costs associated with hosting a panel discussion to answer questions about the Wiregrass biomass plant at the Rainwater Conference Center on Dec. 6, 2010.LAKE posted the detailed expense documents Monday 20 Feb 2011.The total cost for the event was $17,534.36.
The VDT article quotes Col. Allan Ricketts as saying:
“These costs included renting the center and providing refreshments. We view these costs as due diligence because they relate directly to our community. We need to make sure that a project is a good fit for our community and that it won’t do harm to our community,” said Ricketts.If they were so qualified, why wasn’t the VLCIA willing to have local people who would have charged nothing sit on the panel and debate them? Perhaps it’s because so many of the paid experts’ points were so easy to refute, as we know because so many of them have since been amply refuted?“You would want to insure that you going provide the best information available – they are the most qualified professionals you can find. You’d expect to pay them and they expect to be paid for their services.”
-jsq
Kathryn Grant at the
groundbreaking for the
Wiregrass Solar LLC plant:
We’re here to oppose the biomass plant…. We want people to know we support solar energy in hopes that that could be incorporated throughout the state.Here’s the video:
-jsq
Dr. Michael Noll at the
groundbreaking for the
Wiregrass Solar LLC plant:
We’re all for solar, go solar! But no to biomass.Here’s the video:
More Noll here.
-jsq
It was good to see
Georgia Power assisting at the groundbreaking of the
Wiregrass Solar LLC plant, instead of just studying and demonstrating.
The speaker equated solar, biomass, and nuclear.
Hm, what’s that over their heads?
Why, biomass doesn’t seem to be as popular as solar!
I didn’t catch the speaker’s name, but he also recognized
Robbie Hastings, detail manager in Valdosta.
Here’s
the video:
Georgia Power had several pages in the business section of the Valdosta Daily Times (VDT) the previous Sunday, written up on Monday as Harnessing the sun’s rays: Georgia Power kicks off 18-month solar power study, by Karah-Leigh Hancock, about what Gapower is doing instead of actually deploying solar: Continue reading