Category Archives: Community

Budget meeting and Lowndes County Commission meeting tonight

Remember there’s a second


budget hearing today, 28 June 2011 at 5PM.
The county didn’t publish the proposed budbget, but

LAKE did.
Maybe you’d like to come ask some questions, like

these by Jessica Bryan Hughes.

Then there’s the regular session of the County Commission; agenda appended.
They plan to vote tonight to approve the budget they never published.

-jsq




LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS

PROPOSED AGENDA

WORK SESSION, MONDAY, JUNE 27, 2011, 8:30 a.m.

REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 2011, 5:30 p.m.

327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor

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Animal shelter open records from Susan Leavens

Received yesterday from Susan Leavens:

These are the open records that me and another animal control officer
sent to GDA
and I also have Amanda Jordans Statement if you would like
that. Please excuse some of the language in my statement she (pat smith
GDA inspector) told me to write it like it was said….

Here they are on the LAKE web pages.

These records include much more detail than

what we’ve heard before.

After reading them, do you think installing a few cameras is adequate
to deal with this situation?

-jsq

Residential home owners of Lowndes County take notice —Vince Schneider @ LCC 14 June 2011

Vince Schneider warned county homeowners that it could happen to them, too:



To permit
the establishment of the Foxborough Avenue McDonalds, the county has
irreversibly established a most terrible precedence. You too can wake
up one morning to find a Fast food store being built in your front
yard.

Like many of us, he wondered what the county government is thinking:

I cannot comprehend how the county can possibly
benefit from allowing such an establishment to be built in a quite
county residential neighborhood. Is it because it provides unskilled
low paying jobs? Will this McDonalds look good on a resume? It was my
understanding that Valdosta and Lowndes County wanted to attract a more
skilled, professional work force. The real estate on Foxborough Avenue
the county permitted McDonalds to build on would have been, and is prime
real estate for just such a professional enterprise….

Good questions.

Here’s

the video:




Residential home owners of Lowndes County take notice —Vince Schneider @ LCC 14 June 2011

Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),

Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 14 June 2011.

Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.



After Vince Schneider finished reading his letter,
Chairman Ashley Paulk handed him a paper, which was apparently
a communication from County Engineer Mike Fletcher.

Appended is the text of the letter Vince Schneider read to the Commission.

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GA farm worker story goes international

Ray Glier wrote for Agence France Press 23 June 2011,

US farms at risk as workers flee immigration law

ATLANTA, Georgia (AFP) – A controversial immigration law in the US
state of Georgia has brought unintended results, forcing farmers to
reluctantly turn to ex-convicts as Latin American manual workers flee.

Low-skilled, undocumented workers, who for years have formed the backbone
of this southern state’s farming economy, have bolted in the lead-up
to the law taking effect on July 1, fearing deportation if caught
working here.

The measure’s mainly Republican supporters argue that the state needs
to enforce immigration laws in the absence of effective federal action,
saying schools, jails and hospitals are overburdened by illegal aliens.

But as the full cost of the immigration reform emerges in the form of
an estimated millions of dollars worth of crops rotting in fields, it
could alarm other states that have passed or are considering similar
strict measures.

The story quotes the figure of 11,000 needed workers,
and quotes some farmers about that the state’s scheme to
send people on probation to work on farms:

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Why make it hard to obtain the budget? —Jessica Bryan Hughes

Why, indeed? -jsq

This is ridiculous.

-Jessica Bryan Hughes

This comment came in yesterday on

Proposed Lowndes County Budget published by LAKE.

Proposed Lowndes County Budget published by LAKE —Gretchen Quarterman

Apparently there was a budget hearing last week that no one attended.
I don’t see it on the county calendar.

We know it happened though because

the paper reported on it.

The second budget hearing is scheduled for June 28 at 5:00pm and is on
the Lowndes County web site calendar.



At the work session this morning, I asked Ms. Stephanie Black if she
could e-mail me a copy of the budget and she said yes. Ms. Paige Dukes
said that Ms. Black should not e-mail me the document, but I could look
at a paper copy. A paper copy could be provided to me for $0.25 per page.
I asked if there was an electronic copy and Ms. Dukes said that this document
was not available in an electronic form.

Given that the document is neatly typed and clearly is generated from a spread
sheet, I think that it is not true that this document is unavailable in an
electronic format.

I asked if I could photograph it instead and Ms. Dukes said

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Lowndes County budget hearing today 5PM

That’s 5PM, before the usual 5:30 PM Lowndes County Commission regular session time, at 327 North Ashley Street.
The county

has published a public notice about this second hearing.
It’s not clear they did that for the first budget hearing, which was last week.
And the budget doesn’t include the T-SPLOST boondoggles Lowndes County is requesting.

VDT opined 23 June 2011,

What We Think: Surviving, not thriving:



Lowndes County Commissioners held a budget hearing Tuesday to
discuss the 2011-2012 fiscal year with citizens, only to have no citizens
appear. The budget will be finalized at a public hearing Tuesday, June
28, prior to the regular commission meeting.

With all of the attention paid lately to officials and their expenses,
you would think that the opportunity to learn how the county spends
citizens’ tax dollars would have been an opportunity not to be
missed. But missed it was.

After giving people in Valdosta a hard time for
not showing up at their city’s budget hearing,
I have to say: mea culpa. I wasn’t there.

However, I would ask: how were we supposed to know about it?


Someone from LAKE has been at every regularly-scheduled Lowndes County Commission
meeting in the recent past, videoing the whole meetings,
and I must have missed the announcement
of this recent budget hearing, which is also not on the county’s website calendar.

The VDT continues:

Maybe it’s because there’s nothing new about the county’s
budget. It’s the same as it has been for several years — flat.

No increases in revenue are projected. No new positions, merit raises,
cost of living increases, or significant purchases, again. Caps on
assessments, the continuing lull in construction, and slow sales mean no
new revenue is coming in. What is projected is enough to make ends meet,
but there are no frills, no luxury items, not this year.

Oh, there are luxury items, they’re just not in the budget,
because the county is asking we the taxpayers to pay through
the proposed new T-SPLOST tax for

That’s $24 million in new taxes they’re requesting for unnecessary road projects
that will promote sprawl into far north Lowndes County and into Lanier County.
Sprawl that will end up costing Lowndes County more than it can bring in in taxes from the sprawling developments.

And Lowndes County has tacked onto the end a request for
$7.5 million for a bus system.
Which would you rather have?
A bus system that would promote the entire county’s economy,
or five lanes on New Bethel to add to Lanier County sprawl?

Fortunately, T-SPLOST does publicize its hearings,
the next of which will be

6 July 2011 in Nashville, Georgia.

The VDT concludes;

But for Lowndes to thrive, to make such a possibility come alive, it needs
citizens willing to participate in the process. We need creative thinking
and we need leaders willing to listen to the possibilities of new ideas.

Hear hear!

Stay tuned for what happens when a citizen tries to get involved in the
Lowndes County budget process.

-jsq

Helping Your Child Succeed, by Valdosta-Lowndes Chamber of Commerce

Chamber holds child success workshop,
notes parental involvement is key.

Jane Osborn remarked yesterday:

Here is a story that was not in our local paper.

Amber Eady wrote for WALB 20 June 2011,

Chamber workshop helps parents prepare their child for success:



The Helping Your Child Succeed lunch-n-learn workshop was held Friday, June 17.

The workshop was created to help reach parents in the workplace, and
to teach parents about statistics in dropout rates, and the education
system as a whole.

For more information contact Keyara Hamilton at 229-247-8100.

The WALB story appendes the full
Chamber press release, which includes:

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The Atlantic dissects Georgia’s anti-immigrant law

The VDT’s pan of HB 87 gets national notice.
Why we don’t need a law that puts south Georgia farmers out of business
while profiting private prison company CCA at taxpayer expense.

Megan McArdle wrote in the Atlantic 21 June 2011,

Georgia’s Harsh Immigration Law Costs Millions in Unharvested Crops.
She started by quoting Jay Bookman,
who quoted the VDT.
She then goes into the economics:



The economics here aren’t particularly complicated, and I’m sure they
won’t be new to the sophisticated readers of the Atlantic, but they are
useful to look at and consider explicitly when thinking about issues
like this.

It goes like this. If you’re not going to let illegal immigrants do the
jobs they are currently being hired to do, then farmers will have to
raise wages to replace them. Since farmers are taking a risk in hiring
immigrant workers, you can bet they were getting a significant deal
on wage costs relative to “market wages”. I put market wages here in
quotations, because it’s quite possible that the wages required to get
workers to do the job are so high that it’s no longer profitable for
farmers to plant the crops in the first place.

Yes, that would be the problem.
A law that benefits private prison company CCA at the expense of
Georgia taxpayers while putting Georgia farmers out of business.

She concludes:

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GA HB 87 ridiculed in Atlanta; VDT cited

Who could have forseen this?
Well, other than anyone who actually knows Georgia farmers.
And the VDT becomes thought leader to the world:

“Maybe this should have been prepared for, with farmers’ input. Maybe
the state should have discussed the ramifications with those directly
affected. Maybe the immigration issue is not as easy as &lquo;send them
home,&rquo; but is a far more complex one in that maybe Georgia needs them,
relies on them, and cannot successfully support the state’s No. 1
economic engine without them.”

Except of course HB 87 doesn’t just send them home:
it also locks up as many as it can catch, to the profit
of private prison company CCA, at the expense of we the taxpayers.

That’s as quoted by
Jay Bookman in the AJC 17 June 2011,

Ga’s farm-labor crisis playing out as planned:



After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants
out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is,
well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

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