Discussing the VSEB program, John Robinson remarked:
We need the council up here to show us interest in this program.He recommended everybody work together, including city and county.
Here’s the video:
Economic opportunity and cooperation —John Robinson @ VCC 9 June 2011
Regular Meeting, Valdosta City Council (VCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 4 June 2011.
Videos by Barbara Stratton for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
-jsq
John,You may want to consider other reasons for Lanier’s residential growth. There was an explosion of lower cost housing there over the past
10 years. It has attracted a large percentage of Moody folks. This was in part a response to the cost of homes in Lowndes Co. More specifically land cost. One component of the ULDC adoption was a call for higher density developments in the unicorporated areas where at the time, land was cheaper. Unfortunately, those that owned the land picked on the demand and guess what…..the prices started to climb quickly.
Some might refer to this as sprawl. The other item of interest is the budget woes the Lanier County Board of Ed is having as a result of this growth. Residential property demands more in services than it pays for in taxes. Just something to consider. There may not be a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.
-Tim Carroll
Liz Goodwin blogs in The Lookout for Yahoo! News, 10 June 2011, Alabama immigration law pressures schools to check immigration status
Alabama’s new immigration law is drawing comparisons to SB1070, the anti-illegal immigration crackdown signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer last year before a judge quickly blocked it from going into effect.So deal with it by putting more unfunded work on the heads of school administrators?But Alabama’s new law is actually much broader and much tougher than SB 1070–most notably for a provision that asks school administrators to check the immigration status of their students.
Supporters say the law will help the state determine how much public money goes to educating undocumented children.
“That is where one of our largest costs come from,” Sen. Scott Beason, R-Gardendale told The Montgomery Advertiser. “It’s part of the cost factor.”
Besides, if all the schools are required to do is check, what money does that save? Continue reading
According to Mari Herreras in Tucson Weekly, 26 October 2010,
They even made sure both the basic positions and the actual debate would be recorded: Continue readingThe American Friends Service Committee, Private Corrections Working Group, UA Latino Law Students Association, and St. Francis in the Foothills United Methodist Church have organized a series of private prison hearings across the state that kick off tomorrow in Tucson at Pima Community College, Downtown Campus at 1255 N. Stone Ave., in the Amethyst Room from 6 to 8 p.m., moderated by yours truly, Mari Herreras.
The public is invited to present testimony, but the AFSC has also invited representatives from the Arizona Department of Corrections, Corrections Corporation of America (expected to build a new prison in Tucson) and Management and Training Corporation (which manages the Marana Community Correctional Treatment Facility). Word is no one has responded from those organizations, but AFSC organizers know the following presenters will be there to provide critical information on the private prison industry: Stephen Nathan, editor of Prison Privatization Report International; Joe Glen, spokesman for Maricopa and Pima Juvenile Corrections Associations; Brent White, UA law professor; Jim Sanders, real estate appraiser; Susan Maurer, retired corrections commissioner from New Jersey; and Victoria Lopez, from ACLU of Arizona.
The hearing will include the following community leaders who will hear testimony and ask questions: Pima County Supervisor Richard Elias; Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik; Assistant Tucson City Manager Richard Miranda; Representative Phil Lopes; and Mark Kimble, former associate editor of the Tucson Citizen.
Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg wrote in USA Today 3 June 2011, Census reveals plummeting U.S. birthrates
Because families with children tend to live near each other,So that makes Lanier County one of only 49 Continue readingthe result is an increasingly patchy landscape of communities teeming with kids, and others with very few.
…
Even in counties where the percentage of children grew, only 49 gained more than 1 percentage point — many of them suburbs on the outer edge of metropolitan areas such as Forsyth, Whitfield and Newton outside Atlanta and Cabarrus and Union outside Charlotte.
Eyder Peralta wrote for NPR yesterday, Report: U.S. Drug War Spending Is Unjustifiable
That would be Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy that recommended start legalizing drugs with marijuana?Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said that after a year-long investigation by a Senate subcommittee, “it’s becoming increasingly clear that our efforts to rein in the narcotics trade in Latin America, especially as it relates to the government’s use of contractors, have largely failed.”
The report comes a week after a high-powered commission of former world leaders came to the conclusion that the global war on drugs had “failed.” Mark wrote about that report, last week.
And what happens to what little there is of a business plan for private prisons when the U.S. and Georgia wise up and legalize marijuana and other drugs?
We don’t need another bad business boondoggle in Lowndes County. Spend that tax money on education instead.
-jsq
Look a hundred feet farther downstream: Continue reading
Lowndes County is rebuilding the bridge over Skipper Bridge Road near the new school site. I think this is using FEMA funds.
It’s not clear that the new Staten Road bridge is high enough Continue reading
“Corrections over the past 25 years has become an increasingly big component of state budgets, to the point that it’s competing for funding with education and other core services,” Mauer said. “And you can’t have it both ways anymore.”
If we want knowledge-based jobs here, a private prison is not how to get them. Let’s not build a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia. Spend those tax dollars on education instead.
-jsq
GE is working on thin film solar. Meanwhile, costs are already coming down: Continue readingSolar power may be cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels and nuclear reactors within three to five years because of innovations, said Mark M. Little, the global research director for General Electric Co. (GE)
“If we can get solar at 15 cents a kilowatt-hour or lower, which I’m hopeful that we will do, you’re going to have a lot of people that are going to want to have solar at home,” Little said yesterday in an interview in Bloomberg’s Washington office. The 2009 average U.S. retail rate per kilowatt-hour for electricity ranges from 6.1 cents in Wyoming to 18.1 cents in Connecticut, according to Energy Information Administration data released in April.