Category Archives: Community

Rep. Rusty Kidd urged GA PSC to ask GA Power for solar to replace coal Plant Branch @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

First public witness about the GA Power 2013 IRP at the



the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.

GA Rep. Rusty Kidd district 145, who argued for more solar power.


Rep. Rusty Kidd and GA PSC

Rep. Kidd noted

coal Blant Branch closing

Rep. Rusty Kidd and Press
would have substantial economic effect on Putnam County.
He said one of his friends was selling his house on Lake Sinclair
because he knew Putnam County taxes would be going up.
Rep. Kidd urged the Commission to have Georgia Power use
the land of Plant Branch for solar energy.
He also noted that the more coal plants that closed,
the more natural gas would have a monopoly,
and then he expected the price of natural gas to go up.
So he concluded by urging GA PSC to have Georgia Power
put solar power on the Plant Branch property in the near future.

Here’s

the video: Continue reading →

Community Calendar –Jane F. Osborn 2013-06-06



The latest update (Summer 2013) is online for the community calendar
produced by
Jane F. Osborn
who organizes the
Valdosta Civic Roundtable. She wrote:

…the calendar is not produced for civic roundtable, it is just a project of mine for the many counties that lost a source of information when 2-1-1 was discontinued.

She also remarks:

Please note that this prints out to over 60 pages, so you may not want
to print it. Please feel free to send notices of events in the
community that are open to the public. Jane

Jane F. Osborn, MSSW

Valdosta, GA

229-630-0924

LAKE will attempt to remember to update new ones in
this web page
as Miss Jane sends them. We hope you, dear readers, will remind us if we don’t.

-jsq

Remerton Mill demolition –WCTV

Maybe Nina King’s elegy on the sad demolition of Remerton’s Strickland Mill will spur enough people to get involved in the community
so next time a monument is threatened with demolition we can find
the resources to save it, and we can bring things
the community needs now, like fast affordable Internet access for all.


Nina King
Greg Gullberg reported for WCTV 11PM News last night,

Demolition Of Remerton Mill Has Begun,
in which Nina King said:

“Well, it breaks my heart, and it’s so sad.
And I don’t understand why anybody would want a historic
old building torn down like this.”

Continue reading →

If Wal-Mart fires for not following procedures…



George Rhynes asks if Wal-Mart can fire employees who disarmed
an armed robber for not following procedures,
why can’t the manager he says didn’t follow procedures when
the manager fired him be fired in return?
I wonder why Wal-Mart procedures and profit are more important
than employee safety, well-being, or the drain on public resources
to cover what Wal-Mart does not?

George Boston Rhynes wrote to Wal-Mart CEO and President Mike Duke and Board of Directors 20 February 2011,

Wal-Mart Store 899 and 2615, Valdosta, Georgia and China Workers!

Continue reading →

Valdosta Farm Days begins today

9 AM to 1PM today
at the
historic Lowndes County Courthouse, 100 West Central Avenue,
it’s

Valdosta Farm Days,
and every first and third Saturday from May through October.


Downtown Valdosta Farm Days

Come downtown to find the delicious taste of farm fresh food picked
just for you, at Downtown Valdosta Farm Days! The market showcases
locally sourced produce, food items, and arts and crafts from
surrounding areas.

Come for the freshness and stay for the fun at Downtown Valdosta
Farm Days!

We Accept EBT, CREDIT, and DEBIT!


DVFD on Facebook.

Gretchen with rosemary and Yellow Dog:

Continue reading →

Openings on local boards and authorities


Valdosta City Hall Annex
Want to help your community and find out how local politics works
without even having to run for office?
You can apply to be appointed to a local board or authority.

Here are

(most of) the local boards and authorities.
Budgets range from zero to more than $3 million a year.
Influence ranges from unknown to very high.
Your interest you have to determine for yourself.
Maybe start by going to see the

CDBG Citizens Advisory Committee in action Monday.
Bring back some video, will you?

Here’s

a list of openings to be filled by the City of Valdosta soon.
The deadline for applications is 5PM 1 May 2013; that’s next Wednesday.
HTML version is below.
(I would link to a similar list for Lowndes County, but that Commission
doesn’t post such a list.)

Continue reading →

Monday: CDBG Citizens Advisory Committee



A new citizens committee

is meeting Monday:

CDBG Citizen Advisory Committee

Date: 4/29/2013 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM

Cost: FREE

Location: Valdosta City Hall Annex Multi-Purpose Room

300 N. Lee Street

The Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Citizens Advisory Committee
is charged with providing recommendations to the Mayor and City Council
regarding the use of the federal entitlement funding received by the City
of Valdosta through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
(HUD).

For more information, contact the Neighborhood Develoopment at (229) 671-3617.

Who’s on it? Hard to say, although Continue reading →

SB 104 that changed comprehensive plan rules: good or bad?

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.

The Bill: SB 104

Continue reading →

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 reading →

Rural hospitals closing

A state that forces hospital closings by refusing Medicare expansion
while spending a billion dollars a year on locking up too many
prisoners has its priorities wrong.

Tom Baxter wrote for SaportaReport yesterday,

Ominous signs for rural Georgia as hospitals shut their doors,



Lewis forecast at the beginning of the year that five to six rural
hospitals might be forced to close in 2013, and already there have
been two.

Calhoun Memorial Hospital in Arlington closed in February,
and

Stewart-Webster Hospital in Richland shut its doors last week.

That’s only a foretaste, Lewis says, of what’s going to happen when
the Affordable Care Act next year eliminates the

subsidies which
have been key to the survival of many of these hospitals, and
imposes new standards — for instances, penalizing hospitals
for readmitting patients in less than 30 days — which will
directly impact their bottom line.

“We will probably get hurt worse than any state in the
nation,” Lewis said last week. “It’s not like we will be
friendly faces to the feds, and they’re going to come in and do
major damage to us. ” He’s certainly not an enthusiastic fan
of Obamacare, but thinks the state has no choice but to accept the
Medicaid expansion which was intended as compensation for what the
new law takes away.

“With Obamacare coming down the pike, if we don’t get some
kind of relief in (Medicaid) expansion, we will face certain
death,” Lewis said last week.

Ah, so the problem isn’t ObamaCare: it’s Gov. Deal’s refusal to
accept Medicaid expansion!
The AJC warned us about that back in August:

Continue reading →